by Mel Keegan
“Oh, sure.” Drury turned off the scanner and waved them off. “I’ll tell Harrison you wheeled him in here.”
Marin came to rest beside the security drone. Rutherford had seated himself on the side of a bed, with his head down and his eyes averted. They waited for him to speak but his mouth remained sealed until Curtis said,
“No statement, Mister Rutherford? No requests?”
Only then did the man lift his head, and to Travers he seemed to look right through Marin as if he were not there. “I don’t waste my time talking to goons and lackeys.” His voice was dust dry and filled with contempt.
“Very well.” Marin turned his back on the senator and gave Travers an almost amused look. “We’ll leave him to you, Doctor. A word of caution. Don’t trust him. He has a brain like a snake and the instincts of a trapdoor spider.”
“Two words,” Travers added. “Cryogen tank. Or is that one word?”
The surgeon chuckled. “He’s cuffed to a drone, the AI has his scrawny little butt under vid surveillance, and I’m about to chip him. Relax. You can have him back, lock him up, as soon as he’s certified healthy. And as for him talking his way around me – forget it. First, I’m another lackey, remember. I punch Harrison’s clock, and I’d be surprised if his lordship would even speak to the likes of me. Second, my husband’s people are from Omaru, a pretty little fishing town not far outside Hydralis. This bastard almost put half my family on the Colonial War casualty lists.”
Not a flicker of expression passed across Rutherford’s face as she spoke. Travers was satisfied with arrangements, and draped his good arm across Marin’s shoulders to urge him out of the Infirmary. “If you need us, give us a buzz.”
“I will,” she assured him. “How’s the shoulder?”
“Hurts,” Travers said honestly.
“You’re a big boy,” she admonished. “Be brave.”
Travers gave her a very old and rather obscene salute, and followed Marin to the elevator. They were still waiting for a car when the deck picked up a thick, heavy vibration. The Mercury was under full thrust, driving out toward the edge of the Weimann exclusion zone.
“Alshie’nya,” Marin whispered.
“Talk to Mark.” Travers leaned on the bulkhead and palmed his shoulder, pressing to ease the throbbing burn there.
“Talk to Mark,” Curtis agreed as the lift opened.
Chapter Fifteen
Alshie’nya, Rabelais Drift
The navtank was alive with tracking data, and Travers whistled as his eyes skimmed across it. He had never seen so many ships converged in one of the Rabelais Drift’s few safepoints. The ‘tidepool,’ long known to the Resalq as a refuge, was as busy as many a dockyard.
The robot miner Cerberus was almost dormant now. Its holds were heavy with the elusive raw fuel element, and it was idling through the toxic refining process, quarantined from the rest of the fleet by distance, a quarter million kilometers on the far side of Lai’a. Travers could never see the strange, daunting hybrid which had begun life as the Intrepid without a shiver through to his bone marrow. Part human, part Resalq, part Zunshu, it loomed like a goblin against the bright nebulae, yet its voice was calm, rich with the soft Resalq accent, as it spoke with the science crew aboard the Carellan Djerun.
Two of Mark Sherratt’s ships were at Alshie’nya now. The Freyana was preparing to leave Saraine, but the smaller Saiyuri was tethered to the Carellan via hundred meters of cable and conduit, and a half dozen drone shuttles moved constantly between the two.
The sound of Mark’s voice was balm on Travers’s ears. He saw an almost painful expression of relief pass quickly across Marin’s face before Curtis pulled a mask over the turmoil of his feelings. Mark and Dario were in conference with Lai’a, and with Jazinsky aboard the Wastrel, and Paul Wymark, the Arago specialist aboard the Wings of Freedom. They were thrashing out some problem in the fine configuration of the vacuum welds which connected the human habitation module to Lai’a’s belly.
In silhouette, one could clearly see the shape of it under the big ship. They were attaching the body of a cruiser, Travers remembered, a ship that had died on the Bronowski reef. Its engines were fried, its AI was dead, but the hull was sound, and the power and life support systems remained viable. The engine deck had been stripped even of its Prometheus generator, and Lai’a provided every erg of power via an umbilicus. The actual shape of the cruiser could no longer be seen; it seemed to have been encased in a cocoon of silver-gray metal which fluoresced purple, green, blue, like fish scales. The Zunshu alloy was cast in plates, interleaved in layers and vacuum welded into a pod-like structure inside which the stripped cruiser would be armored against both the Rabelais Drift and Lai’a’s own hyper-Weimann drive.
The Wastrel and the Wings were standing by the hulking shape of the hybrid, and Paul Wymark’s crew had merely paused in mid-assignment while some structural problem was hammered out. The human habitation module was very much a last-minute thought. Lai’a was never conceived of or designed to carry a live crew. It remained at zero pressure, and was still heavily contaminated after the event that had killed the Intrepid. And every cavity of the massive hull was filled with drones, ordnance, fuel.
The work was almost done. As Travers slipped a combug into his ear and began to listen in on the conference, he heard Paul Wymark’s status update. Four times, the hyper-Weimann drive had been run up to ignition minus one second, and it checked out fine. The hull had been scanned down to the molecular level; the three generators had been heavily modified and were rated to twenty percent over their original operational capacity.
More than four thousand drones were stored aboard now, and five hundred of them were combat machines, battlefield units not unlike the drones which had fought the Zunshu automata at Ulrand Prime. Two squadrons of Murchison F104s and four gunships were fully armed and armored, under Lai’a’s control, and Shapiro’s claim that the ship could fight a major war on its own was no exaggeration.
Beyond the Wings of Freedom was the Earthlight, constantly shuttling around the fleet, doing the hard work of a harbor tug; and idling on station keeping a few kilometers off the Wastrel’s bow was the Esprit de Liberté – still fitting, still surrounded by a swarm of drones.
Listening intently to the Wastrel’s loop, Travers heard a voice he knew. Tully Ingersol was arguing animatedly with technicians on the Wings. They were trying to align the Weimanns aboard the Esprit, with input from Tonio Teniko which did not seem to be sitting well with Ingersol. Relations were about to break down into mutual cursing when Richard Vaurien’s voice cut across them both.
“Get the numbers together, pipe them into the lab – run them again. And as for you, Tonio, sweeten up. Bill Grant wants you in the Infirmary ten minutes ago. You know why you’re barking like a tied up terrier. You’re late for your goddamned shot!”
“Don’t you lecture me about my shots,” Teniko snarled. “Tell Grant I don’t have the fucking time to go to the fucking Infirmary. Tell him to get his nasty little ass in here.”
“Tell him yourself!” Barb Jazinsky roared over the loop. “Bill? Bill Grant, damnit, where are you?”
And Grant, with an Australian accent so thick with anger, it would have sliced with a knife: “I heard, Barb. Shit, you people must think I’m deaf! And tell the weird little creep I’m up to my eyeballs in pre-op for surgery on the tech that ripped his bloody stupid arm off in the machinery over on the Esprit this morning. If Teniko wants his dope, he can drag his bastard ass in here.”
Vaurien snorted with acid humor. “You heard, Tonio? Consider yourself told. And get those damned numbers together. Run the whole data set again before you call Ingersol wrong.”
“He’s so wrong, you want to be dumping him out an airlock,” Teniko growled, quite audibly over the open loop.
“That does it.” Ingersol was breathing so heavily, every breath rasped over the comm pickup – Travers knew he was moving fast, on an impulse. “I’m coming over there, and I�
�m going to separate that little ratshit from his breath once and for all.”
“Tully,” Richard called, “let it be, man. Let it go. He’s not worth it.”
“If he’s not freakin’ worth it,” Ingersol demanded, “what’s he doing on this ship? I’m telling you, Richard. It’s him or me. You want him, you get me another berth. Jesus Christ, I’ll even take the Esprit and live in a freakin’ tin can!”
“I have a better idea,” Jazinsky said icily. “We give Teniko the tin can and he can chew on a crew of drones who don’t answer back. The work he’s doing, he can do from there just as easily as here.”
Travers whistled softly and looked sidelong at Marin, who was also listening in. They were in the Mercury’s ops room, watching the displays, the navtank, the vidfeed from the forward scan platforms. Alshie’nya was busy with ships, noisy with comm traffic which pivoted around the Wastrel and the Carellan. But the Wastrel was not the stable, happy ship it had always been, and Travers was aware of a surge of resentment.
The discontent had only begun since Teniko came aboard with expertise and opinions which were often at odds with Jazinsky and Ingersol, and no desire to voice them amicably. Travers touched the bug and said quietly,
“Richard, this is Neil … the Mercury is on her way in. Can we help? Where do you want us?”
“Neil?” Vaurien breathed a sigh of something like relief. “Come right over. Have you eaten? They’re setting up the ’chefs for dinner – the Sherratts will be here in an hour.” He paused. “It’s damned good to hear your voice. You, uh, been listening to the comm?”
“They’re a happy bunch,” Travers observed.
“Working too hard, too long, under too much stress,” Vaurien said pragmatically. “To be fair to the kid, Tonio’s doing fine work. He’s wrangling the Zunshunium refinement process in realtime, just him and the Resalq AI on the Cerberus – and he’s put us a whole day ahead of schedule. If he wasn’t such a spiteful little snot, you’d commend him … but he is, and you just want to smack him instead. The truth? We’re all on the ragged edge, Neil. We’re so close, we can taste the prize.”
“Close to a launch?” Marin wondered.
“Curtis – good to have you here,” Vaurien said tersely, “and yes, we’re looking at a live test. No more simulations. It either works or it doesn’t, and we need to know now.”
”And if it doesn’t?” Marin’s brows rose as he gave Travers a dark glance.
“It will.” Vaurien’s voice was taut as steel hawsers. “I’m looking at the Mercury on tracking … you’ll be docking in five minutes. Meet me in the crew lounge. I’ll break out the good cognac.”
As the Mercury drove in across Alshie’nya, the number of drones, the complexity of their work, and the fallout of complex, dangerous industries became more apparent. Lai’a was standing well off, under quarantine, and Travers swore softly as his eyes scanned down the columns of data. A vid angle of the ship was nested in the corner of the screen, grainy with extreme range, and even at this distance the blue-green shimmer of the hyper-Weimann modules was visible.
The engines were not yet installed in the airframe. At that moment they were suspended in a web of Arago fields, two hundred meters above the spine of the old Intrepid, attended by a cloud of industrial drones. The cavity where they would drop into the housing already yawned open like an ink-black cavern, punctuated at odd intervals by the sun-bright arcs of welding machines.
And even at this distance, every sensor the Mercury possessed lit up in warnings of the potential radiotoxic hazard, but the watch crew merely ignored them. The Wastrel was closer yet, flanked by the Esprit on one side and the Carellan on the other, and her sterntubes glowed a deep, angry red. She had been maneuvering recently, and Travers made an educated guess. She had lifted the hyper-Weimann assembly into place, where it would be fine-tuned by handling drones. Those drones would be fried in hours and discarded by the scores.
“Damnit, I wish Mick could have seen this,” he said softly. “He used to love this stuff. He had half of Alexis Rusch’s brain for the science, and if it flew, he was its bastard half-brother.”
“Mick and Alexis have the same genetics,” Marin said with dry humor. “Ernst Rabelais’s genes – they’re Velcastran royalty and proud of it.” He smiled faintly and set a hand on Travers’s arm. “We’ll be docking very soon. Shapiro’s going to want to catch up with Richard, and I …”
He was eager to talk to Mark Sherratt, and if Travers told the truth, he felt the same desire. After the weeks of deferring the big decisions, time had expired, and Travers felt the unaccustomed flutter of his belly. He slipped the bug out of his ear and turned his back on the navtank.
He might have suggested calling Shapiro, but the man was framed in the wide ops room doorway, with Jon Kim a pace behind him, and both Robert Chandra Liang and Madame Deuel had just stepped out of the lift. The lady was dressed for a social event in a clinging gray satin gown and a lot of white gold jewelry, as if a dinner invitation to the Wastrel were the height of local chic. Lost in Alshie’nya, perhaps it was. Chandra Liang was in black, silk slacks and high-collared tunic, with his hair caught back in a titanium clasp and the Daku amulet displayed openly on his breast, a big amulet worked in gold and blue enamel.
The AI was whispering discreet updates on the status of the Mercury as she came alongside the salvage tug, matched her position and nudged a docking adapter into place. As the dull chime of powerful electromagnets making contact rang through the hull, Shapiro gave Travers and Marin a critical look.
“You could consider dressing for dinner,” he suggested pointedly.
“Aboard a working salvage tug?” Travers demanded.
And Marin guessed, “We have company?”
“Distinguished company.” Shapiro glanced down at his own elegant slacks, shirt, jacket. Civilian clothes. He had not worn the uniform since the Mercury left Borushek, and he severed his last connection with the Confederate military. His last claim to rank or command was the Fleet insignia he wore on his lapel, and the moment he stepped off the Mercury his authority was tenuous. He looked at his chrono and nodded back in the direction of the cabins. “Top brass, several captains, at least one general, our senior scientists … the President and First Lady of the Republic of Velcastra. A rare excuse,” he added in amused tones, “to dress.”
Travers and Marin were in the dark blue fatigues common to the cruiser’s crew – comfortable, routine, unremarkable, and without a word they headed aft. “Any excuse to dress in a place like this,” Travers observed as he shouldered into their quarters and threw open the closet.
“Captains, generals, politicians.” Marin was looking through the racks. “After three weeks on a military ship, I imagine Liang and Deuel would be delighted to put on their glad rags to eat sushi and drink beer with the likes of Mark Sherratt and Richard Vaurien!” He had pulled out the silver gray slacks and shirt, and was heeling off his boots as he tossed the black trousers and white tunic in Travers’s direction. “These, I think.”
“Not the dress uniforms?” Travers caught the civilian garments, held them against his chest and gave himself a frown in the dressing mirror.
For a moment Marin hesitated, and then shook his head. “Not this time … at least, not for me. Wear the uniform if you like, Neil, but I think I’ve hung it up for the last time.”
He was right, and Travers did not even reach into the closet. They dressed swiftly, listening to the AI’s soft, continuous whispers over the loop. Etienne announced that the Mercury had locked on, and routine bioscans had returned no hazmat warnings. The docking adapter was secure moments later, and pressures gently equalized across both ships over the space of several minutes.
Shapiro and Kim, Liang and Deuel were still waiting for the Wastrel to authorize boarding when Travers and Marin returned, and Shapiro looked them up and down less critically.
“We’ll do?” Marin’s voice was light with amusement.
“You look,” Jon Kim obs
erved wryly, “like civilians. It didn’t occur to you to wear the dress uniform?”
“It occurred, but Neil and I … shall I say, we decline to go into this as servicemen under orders.” Marin’s mood sobered quickly and he shot a sidelong glance at Travers, who agreed with a mute nod. “This is it, General,” Curtis said in quiet tones, and met Shapiro’s eyes levelly. “The hard choices will be made here.”
“I believe they will.” Shapiro took a breath, held it, let it out slowly. “I asked you weeks ago to make your decision, and you’ve deferred it to the last plausible moment.” He frowned at the civilian clothes they had chosen. “Do I take this to mean you’re shipping out with Mark’s crew?”
But Marin’s head was shaking slowly. “Not necessarily. But whether we remain formally with your private staff is another question. I’d prefer to be able to shake you by the hand as a civilian and agree to work with you in a professional capacity, rather than standing to attention, saluting and taking orders.”
The words cut directly to the critical issues, and Shapiro accepted them without question. He looked from Marin to Travers and back. “You’ve earned the privilege time and again. All right, gentlemen. Consider yourselves Fleet Reserve specialists, serving in an advisory capacity.” His eyes creased in a smile. “We’ll call the duty consultation. Will that do?”
As the docking rings rolled open at last, Travers chuckled. “It will. And it’s not that we don’t recognize the magnitude of the Lai’a expedition – we do. But there’s more.” He gestured in the direction of the Resalq ships. “You know our allegiance is a little divided. A lot of humans will be heading out with the Resalq, and if things turn sour in the Deep Sky, they’ll be the survivors.”
“Their worlds, not ours,” Shapiro said gravely, “will be the future of humanity out here, as well as the Resalq. I agree, Neil. Mark Sherratt said the same thing to me, not half an hour ago.” He touched the combug in his left ear. “I believe it’s time we all shared data. Time to lay the cards on the table.” He stepped aside to allow them to go by. “I’ll have Jon organize the documentation, transfer you to the Reserves list – with a promotion, I think. It’s been earned, and when the dust settles the gratuity accompanying the rank will serve you both well in civilian life.”
