Starliner

by David Drake

  He turned and looked at Mohacks and Babanguida. The faces of both ratings froze. "I intend to be a good officer to the men under me, but I understand that I am their officer. It's part of my duty to see to it that they do theirs."

  "Yes sir!" Mohacks said. Babanguida's face could have been cast in concrete.

  "For the rest," Ran said, facing around to Kneale again, "it's like I said before. Passengers are passengers, ships are ships. I have a lot to learn about the Empress, but there's nothing in my duties aboard her that I haven't accomplished on lesser vessels."

  Kneale smiled vaguely. "Are there any questions for Mr. Colville, then?" he said.

  "Ah, sir?" asked Crewman Blavatsky. Her voice was hesitant from doubt that enlisted personnel were included in the offer.

  Ran nodded. "Yes?"

  "Is your family from Earth, then?" Blavatsky said.

  "It's a full ten years since I've set foot on the planet, Blavatsky," Ran said. He chuckled in the well-tested belief that good humor would deflect attention from the way he avoided answering the question. "I left Earth at the end of Officers' Academy, and I haven't been back since."

  "If there are no further questions," Kneale said calmly, "you're all dismissed in accordance with the duty roster. Have a safe leave, people."

  The enlisted personnel were all on their feet before the last syllable was out of the commander's mouth.

  "Where is your family, Ran?" Wanda Holly asked in a firm, clear voice.

  "Ma'am, I don't have one," Ran answered flatly. He smiled. There was no humor in the expression.

  The pause among the ratings dissolved into a rush out the door. Ran started to follow them.

  "If you wouldn't mind, Colville," Commander Kneale said, "I'd like a word in private with you in my office."

  "Certainly, sir," Ran said. His face was as bland as Mohacks' a moment earlier—

  And he felt the pressure of Wanda Holly's eyes on his back.

  * * *

  The file on Randall Colville came aboard from the mail gig which met the Empress of Earth when she dropped from sponge space into the solar system. The gig, making one or two more sponge space transits than the starliner dared and by braking her slight mass hard, would arrive on Earth twelve hours ahead of the larger vessel—a half day that could be crucial with some information that couldn't be entrusted to electro-optical transmission no matter how scrambled.

  Commander Hiram Kneale read the file as soon as the gig was under way. The new man's, Colville's, record with Trident was exemplary. His background before taking service with the line was sketchy and somewhat unusual, but there wasn't anything remarkable in it. Colville had been born on Earth, in the Aberdeen Prefecture, and had emigrated to Satucia with his parents as an infant

  There were no file entries after that until Colville reappeared as supercargo—purser's assistant—on the Prester John, whose captain had enthusiastically nominated Colville for a place in the Trident Officers' Academy in Greenwich Prefecture. Colville had started slow in the academy, but he'd proceeded at an accelerating pace and had been rewarded with a Third Officer's slot on a mixed-load packet that traded between Wallaby, Grantholm, and Munch. From there on out, Colville went from successful tour to success—as was to be expected in an officer assigned to the Empress.

  Only . . . unscheduled freighters like the Prester John didn't carry supercargos, and one glance at Ran Colville in the flesh told Kneale what the holographic portrait in the files had led him to suspect: Colville didn't come from Satucia, and he probably hadn't been born on Earth. He was a Bifrost man, as sure as Hiram Kneale had been raised in the lemon groves of Sulimaniya, where each tree had its own drystone wall as protection from the summer winds.

  "So, Mr. Colville," Kneale said from behind the desk in his office. "I hope you'll be comfortable aboard our Empress. She's a fine ship. The finest."

  Holographic projections curtained the walls of the commander's office. Many officers used that luxury fitment to display scenes of their homeworlds or their families. Kneale's walls were four views of the Empress of Earth, docking on Earth and Tblisi, Grantholm and Nevasa—the major worlds of her run.

  On the ceiling was a fragment of the Empress's bow, framed by the twisted light of sponge space. The hull metal shimmered with the rime of gases which had migrated from the vessel's interior when she dipped back into the sidereal universe. Ran Colville's eyes kept flicking up toward that view. His expression was unreadable.

  The hologram had been taken from one of the Empress's lifeboats. The photographer, a Szgranian hexabranch, displayed her genius in the shot, because relationships in sponge space were not what they appeared to the eyes of the body. To correctly judge the direction and distance that a camera—or ship, or gun—would travel on its path to another object in sponge space was a calculation at which the most powerful artificial intelligences failed a dozen times for every success.

  Military forces throughout known space continued to experiment. Sponge space was the perfect cover for an attack—if one could calculate where one's target was.

  "I'm very honored to be assigned to the Empress, sir," Colville said. "I hope I'll be worthy of her. I'll do my best to be worthy of her."

  He met Kneale's eyes firmly, perhaps fiercely. Well, there was no falsehood in those statements. Colville was willing to die trying. That was how he probably would die one day, always pushing harder to be the best at whatever he saw as the next step up, until it turned out that what had seemed to be a step was really a long drop—

  "The Empress is special, Mr. Colville," Kneale continued. "And I don't mean that she—she and the Brasil—are valuable artifacts, though they're that as well. We can be quite sure there are men on Grantholm and Nevasa today calculating how many troops they could pack aboard either superliner for a lightning invasion of the other planet."

  Kneale didn't know how to explain to the stiff-necked young officer across the desk from him that Colville had already succeeded. The very falseness of Colville's beginnings made the man Colville's will created more real—and therefore more useful to Trident Starlines—than a fellow who'd simply walked up the path of success which his birth laid out for him.

  "But she's more than that, our Empress," Kneale continued softly. "She's a symbol of all that's best of civilization. She mustn't be perverted from that course."

  Kneale read poetry in the silence of his suite during placid moments, Millay and Donne and Vergil. He had never found in verse quite the solemn beauty which the Empress of Earth represented to him.

  "I don't entirely follow you, sir," Colville said, cautiously. He was as obviously tense as a cocked trigger spring—afraid that his new superior was mad, and afraid that this was some lengthy charade to inform him that he'd been found out at last . . . which of course he had. He would never believe that it didn't matter that Kneale knew or suspected the truth.

  "Were you ever a soldier, Colville?" Kneale asked abruptly.

  "I . . ." the younger man said, "haven't been, no. My—"

  The pause was to find the right words, because it was already too late to burke the statement "My father was a, a soldier, sir. He didn't talk about it much, but when he died I found a batch of chips from his helmet recorder. I . . . watched them when I found a playback machine."

  Kneale's smile was as grim as a granite carving. "From Svent Istvan?" he asked. Thirty-five years ago, Grantholm had intervened on behalf of its nationals trading on Svent Istvan. Several of the battalions had come from Bifrost, one of the worlds already under Grantholm hegemony.

  "No sir," Colville said in a colorless voice. The question told him that Kneale suspected—or knew—the truth about his new Third Officer's background. "From Hobilo. During the Long Troubles."

  "Right," said the commander, a place-holder while he considered his next words. "Then you have a notion of what I mean when I say that war is the greatest evil that man has had to face since before he was human. Because it's a perversion of skill and creativity; because it
focuses all his abilities on destruction."

  Colville licked his lips. "Yes sir," he said in the same flat voice.

  "Starships are the means of bringing help and communication between worlds, Colville," Kneale went on. "In a war, it's troops and weapons and violence instead. Those of us who understand that evil have to prevent it from happening here on the Empress."

  "But Earth isn't going to take sides in a war between Grantholm and Nevasa, is it?" Colville said, shocked into more openness than he'd permitted himself since entering his superior's suite. "Surely not!"

  "No," Kneale agreed, "not that. But we have passengers from both planets, going home ahead of the crisis, and we'll be touching down on both planets unless war actually breaks out. It was tense on the run back from Tblisi, but it's going to be a great deal worse on the outbound leg. We—you and I and Lieutenant Holly—are primarily responsible for keeping the cancer from affecting the Empress."

  "I wonder . . ." said Colville, turning his keyed-up brain to a problem that involved him professionally rather than personally."—If it wouldn't be a good idea to take both Nevasa and Grantholm off the route now, before the shooting starts?"

  He looked up at the ceiling again and continued, "Because as you said, sir, there are a lot of people looking at the military use they could make of the Empress. Both planets have national-flag fleets, but none of their ships has a quarter of our capacity, and—ships can't keep formation in sponge space. Having a large force on one vessel rather than spreading it out in packets on four hulls or more . . . that might be the difference between a beachhead and a disaster."

  Kneale nodded appreciatively. "You're quite right, Randall—do you go by Randall?"

  "Huh? Ah, Ran, sir. Actually. Though—"Colville smiled in a not-quite-calculating manner. "—I've answered to shithead a time or two. Anything you please. But Ran for choice."

  "Staff Side officers traditionally don't stand on ceremony when we're alone," Kneale said, smiling also. "I'm Hiram—unless you screw up royally. Just don't make the mistake of calling Captain Kanawa 'Sam'—or anything else but 'Sir!'"

  Kneale paused again, eyeing the younger man. Without really intending to do so, he'd thrown Colville badly off-balance. The threat of exposure, unstated and unmeant, still hung over the man, but going to a first name basis was a positive sign. You drove laboratory animals mad more quickly with random punishments and rewards than you could with a regimen of brutal punishment alone.

  "Neither side is going to do anything as crude as an open seizure of the Empress of Earth," Kneale resumed. "Every planet but Earth is still a frontier, though some pretend they're not. The outworlds, particularly Grantholm, sneer at Federated Earth because she has so much power and doesn't use it the way they would—but they respect the power. They know that Earth could swat them, any one or all together, as easily as a whale could swamp a dinghy. Whatever else they do, they won't force the whale to take action against them; and commandeering Terran shipping would do just that."

  Colville cleared his throat and said, "If the Empress were just to vanish, though, the Legislative Council would dither. The Federation bureaucracy wouldn't be able to act without authorization. And maybe if the ship was handed back after Grantholm won the war—with an indemnity for Trident Starlines and any passengers who were in the wrong place when the shooting started—they might get away with it. Grantholm might."

  The left corner of Kneale's mouth lifted. "That would be risky too, don't you think?"

  Colville shrugged. "War's a risk."

  "And you think Grantholm will win this war?"

  "I think everybody on Grantholm thinks they'll win it," Colville stated flatly. "Personally, I think if it comes to open war, they'll both lose, but they'll wreck fifty planets and kill millions of people to prove it. But that's not my business. The Empress of Earth is my business."

  Kneale stared at the younger man for long moments, deciding whether or not to say more. At last he went on, "Trident Starlines has a very rigid set of rules. For instance, the safety of passengers is paramount I'm sure that Captain Kanawa would unhesitatingly surrender his ship, this ship, if he felt that by doing otherwise he was risking the lives of his passengers."

  Colville nodded, wary again, certain that the conversation was about to veer from normal channels.

  "But some officers, even in an organization as controlled as Trident," the commander went on, "have bent the rules when they had to. And they're willing to do it again. For Trident, for civilization."

  "Sir?" Colville said softly.

  "I knew a fellow from Sulimaniya," Kneale said. His eyes were focused in the direction of the holographic mural behind Colville, the Empress undocking from Grantholm. The blue glare of the starliner's magnetic motors reflected between the low overcast and the soft, fresh snow covering the hills around the spaceport. "He killed a man—his business partner."

  Kneale smiled. His expression was terrible to see. "Actually, he'd killed quite a lot of people a few years before, but they told him that made him a hero because he'd been guarding the Parliament House during the Enlightenment Riots. But this was different. He had to run.

  "He got off planet—that was easy. What planet he ran to doesn't matter; it could have been almost anywhere. And he got a job as ground staff for Trident Starlines. That wasn't terribly hard either, because he was only a janitor, hitting the spots that it wasn't cost-effective to program the cleaning robots to get. And that put him around the data base at night, when nobody else was in the terminal building."

  Ran Colville was looking at Kneale with the expression of a man feeing a snake he knows is poisonous, but which may or may not be hostile to him. Colville said nothing.

  "Nobody expects janitors to be able to use central, computers," Kneale said. "People are sloppy. They leave mechanical lock-outs open and they write passwords down on memo pads. So my friend built himself up an identity, confirmed it, and cut himself orders for Trident Officers' Academy. He didn't have a lot of problem after that. He really had the background, you see. Only he couldn't use the real one since he'd murdered the son of a bitch who'd been robbing him blind because he knew my friend trusted him."

  "What are you telling me?" Colville said in a voice like shingles creaking in the night

  "I'm telling you that Trident Starlines needs resourceful officers," Kneale replied. "I'm telling you that people will believe a man is what he seems to be. I'm telling you that a man is what he seems to be. So it's very important that you and I and our friends all act like dedicated officers to whom Trident Starlines is more than our lives."

  And to whom civilization is more even than Trident Starlines, but Commander Hiram Kneale didn't say that aloud.

  His smile softened. "That's all, Ran. But particularly now, I thought it was important that you hear it. Go on about your business. I'm sure you have personal business to take care of before undocking."

  "Thank you, sir," Colville said. He stood and saluted crisply.

  He turned, then paused and looked back over his shoulder. "I—expect to make myself worthy of your trust, Commander."

  "Hiram," corrected Kneale. "I expect you will too, Ran."

  And that was god's truth. Because otherwise, Kneale would have seen to it that this hard-faced imposter was under the jail.

  EARTH:

  UNDOCKING

  "Excuse me, Captain," said the beaming passenger just as Ran Colville's ear clip buzzed him. "I wonder if I might trouble you to stand by my wife for a picture? To show people back home that we were really here, you know."

  The dip raided again. Somebody sure thought it was an emergency.

  The center of the Social Hall—the Empress's First Class lounge—was a huge expanse, almost the worst room in the ship for Ran to find a place in which to flex his communicator to part of the structure. The walls sported holographic images of the buildings surrounding the Roman Forum in the time of Augustus, and the designers hadn't needed to modify the scale greatly to fit the available s
pace.

  Ordinary radio communications didn't work within the mass of metal and electronics that was the Empress of Earth. On so large a ship, a public address blaring audio requests from tannoys in every compartment was, for both practical and esthetic reasons, possible only in general emergencies. For most purposes, messages were pulsed in recipient-coded packets from infra-red lenses in the vessel's moldings. These were picked up and converted to audio alarms by the clip each crewman wore behind one ear.

  For actual communication, the crewman switched on the commo unit on his waistbelt and turned so that the unit had a line of sight to a ceiling transceiver. When the commo unit was on and properly positioned, the system provided full two-way communication between all portions of the vessel's interior.

  About a hundred passengers sat in the lounge or stood, viewing the holographic murals with awkward nonchalance. They had arrived early and, with their luggage stowed in their cabins, had nothing very obvious to do. Most of them were new to interstellar travel—old hands at the business tended to arrive hours or less before undocking, perhaps having first called "their" steward to see that "their" cabin (or often suite) would be ready for them to slip into with the ease of putting on a favorite pair of shoes.

  The furniture in the Social Hall mimicked the curves and color of the ivory stools of Roman senators, but common sense (or Trident officials) had prevented the designer from more than suggesting that thoroughly uncomfortable fashion. The chairs and couches had backs—which adjusted to users' posture. They were upholstered in red-purple silk, the true color of "imperial purple," though few of the Empress's passengers were going to make that connection.

  Silk was neither more comfortable nor more lustrous than many of the synthetics that might have been used in its place, but First Class clients of the Empress of Earth could be expected to tell the difference. Thin silk cover cloths were laid over a synthetic base, edge-bonded, and replaced as soon as they showed signs of wear.