Starliner

by David Drake

  He looked around in disgust. "At least on The City of San Juan, I was only sharing my cabin with one other guy, not fifty."

  CLANG

  Several passengers screamed.

  "What the hell is that?" bellowed the well-dressed young man across the aisle from Chekoumian. When the fellow tried to stand up, he found that the restraint system clamped him solidly into his seat no matter how he poked or twisted.

  "By the name of the Virgin!" Timurkanov said. "That was a lifeboat launching or I'm a Jew!"

  "Please stay calm, ladies and gentlemen," the crewman called. He had to shout to be heard. The timbre of his voice suggested that he hadn't been thrilled by the sound either. "There's nothing to be—"

  CLANG

  More distant, but clearly another launch to those who recognized the sound—and proof that the Empress of Earth was breaking up to the passengers who didn't. More people were screaming and tearing in vain at their restraints.

  Almost anticlimactically, the hatch slid open—the seats unlocked—and the lighting within the lifeboat brightened dazzlingly to the same level as that of the corridor outside.

  "There is no hurry, please, ladies and gentlemen!" cried a steward who was pummeled aside by the first rush of passengers through the hatch.

  "I guess we can go now, buddy," said Yuri Timurkanov when he noticed that his aisle-side companion wasn't moving. After a further moment, he tapped Chekoumian on the shoulder. The importer's hologram reader quivered, then slipped from his fingers.

  "What?" Chekoumian said, wild-eyed. "Oh—I'm sorry."

  He lurched out of his seat and staggered down the aisle without looking back at Timurkanov.

  Timurkanov picked up the abandoned reader. "Hey, buddy?" he called. "You dropped this."

  The projected news was a report on the wedding the previous day of Marie Djushvili to Ivan Lishke, a timber merchant of Bogomil.

  * * *

  The whang of Lifeboat 67's launch echoed metallically through the boat deck.

  "One away," said Ran Colville to the six Cold Crewmen with him in the machinery room nestled between Bay 109 and Bay 111.

  Swede, a watch chief with twenty-two years in sponge space, grunted. Ran didn't have a clue as to what the fellow meant by the grunt, or if it was even a response to the statement. The remaining Cold Crewmen, all from Swede's watch, were frozen-eyed and silent.

  Ran regretted not having Mohacks and Babanguida to back him, but only because he would have liked someone to talk to. Cold Crewmen couldn't talk on duty and didn't talk much when they were off-watch.

  Ran didn't have the least concern about the way Swede and his crew would perform if a Nevasan hijack team suddenly rushed up the corridor from Bay 111. Two of the Cold Crewmen had been issued submachine guns. The other four men bore the equipment of their occupation: adjustment tools and, for Swede, an arc shears that weighed sixty kilos and could saw through 70-mm collapsed-steel hull plating at the rate of a centimeter/second.

  Theoretically the Cold Crewmen were to back up the Third Officer and his bandolier of stun bombs, which would provide the first line of defense. Realistically—if the Nevasans broke out of Bay 111, there was going to be a bloodbath the like of which hadn't been seen on a starliner since the Strasbourg had the incredibly bad luck to collide with an asteroid while inbound toward Earth.

  Commander Kneale had looked askance when he heard who Ran wanted for support, given that the Staff Side ratings on his watch were unavailable. Kneale hadn't objected, though.

  Lifeboat 111 fired with a clang and a double shockwave. At a distance, even on the Boat Deck, the suction as the outer doors closed and the inner ones opened to refill the bay was muted. Ran and his men were next to the bay. The hatch to their hiding place was ajar to save time if they were needed. They got the full, ear-popping effect

  They were used to it. The Cold Crewmen were in and out of airlocks at four-hour intervals for as long as the Empress of Earth was in transit between the stars, and their berths between watches were just off the engineering control room, where the locks were.

  As for Ran—it didn't seem like very long since he'd been in the same business. The intervals between changes had been longer, though, because tramps weren't crewed like luxury liners.

  The machinery room had a flat-screen communicator. It was live with a pattern of fluorescent static until the lifeboat fired in the next bay. Hiram Kneale's dark face appeared, wearing a smile that could have been carved in granite. "Congratulations, Mr. Colville," the commander said.

  "Wanda's end is all right?" Ran asked. "Ah, Ms. Holly's?"

  "Wanda's end is just fine," Kneale said with the smile broadening. "Go ahead and tell our Nevasan friends the score. Bridge will connect you to the talk-between-ships laser."

  "Me, sir?" Ran said in surprise. "Shouldn't it be you—or Captain Kanawa?"

  The corridors of the Boat Deck began to hiss with the shoes and voices of passengers released from the lifeboats. No one had been assigned to the two bays on either side of 111 and of 67, but some passengers shuffled past the machinery room on their way to lift shafts. Most of them were complaining.

  "It was your idea, Ran," Kneale said. "Your bright idea, I'm very thankful to say."

  Ran shrugged. "All right," he said. "Bridge, TBS to lifeboats six-seven and one-one-one."

  The flat screen split vertically to display the backs of Mohacks' and Babanguida's heads on the separate sides. Beyond the two ratings were long ranks of angry men and women, clamped into their lifeboat seats by the restraint system. The passengers were bellowing in fury.

  "Mohacks!" Ran shouted to get the crewman's attention. "Babanguida! You're all right?"

  The ratings turned with grins that mirrored one another, though there was no direct communication between the two lifeboats.

  "You bet, Mr. Colville," Mohacks said. "How's Babanguida doing?"

  "You keep your part of the bargain," said Babanguida, "and you don't have to worry about me. Hey, Mohacks hasn't stepped on his dick, has he?"

  "You're both fine," Ran said, responding to both expressions of concern. "And your bonuses have been credited to your accounts at the Trident offices on Tellichery. You'll have enough to live on until we pick you up on the next trip."

  Mohacks held a compact machine pistol which he should not have had, either aboard the Empress or on the lifeboat he was conning. It looked like one of the weapons lying around after the firefight on Calicheman.

  Babanguida didn't have a gun—well, he probably did have a gun, but it wasn't visible to the communicator's pick-up lens. Instead, the tall black rating held an incendiary grenade in his left hand. He'd pulled the safety pin, and he held the spoon down with the tip of one finger.

  "You don't know how I plan to live, sir," Mohacks said with a chuckle.

  "The hell with the bonus," Babanguida said simultaneously. "I'm looking at the amnesty for any little misunderstandings I might've been mixed up in while I've shipped with Trident."

  Babanguida was grinning, but Ran Colville had no reason to doubt the sincerity of the statement. Quite the contrary. That was why he'd chosen, and Commander Kneale had approved, the two Third Watch ratings as helmsmen for the lifeboats that would be launched. Mohacks and Babanguida had the balls to do just about anything, and the brains to get away with it. The proof of the latter point was the fact they were both out of jail.

  "Let me attend to the rest of this," Ran said. "I don't suppose you can move the screen so more of the passengers can see me?"

  The ratings couldn't, but they squeezed themselves against the curve of the hull to keep from blocking the lifeboat displays.

  "If I may have your attention?" Ran said, then waited until the angry passengers quieted. On Lifeboat 67, that required a crisp order from a middle-aged Nevasan who was listed on the passenger manifest as a mining engineer. He looked tough enough to chew tunnels through solid rock.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," Ran continued, "you are in orbit around Tellichery. You
r helmsmen will land you at the Carnatica Reservation as soon as the Empress of Earth enters sponge space, which we will do momentarily."

  He nodded, marking a stage in his discussion. "On behalf of Trident Starlines," he continued, "I apologize to any of you who are genuine passengers. Unfortunately, the bulk of your ninety-six fellows are members of a hijack team employed by a government in contravention of the laws of war and those of Federated Earth, under whose flag this vessel sails."

  Lifeboat 111 rumbled with low-voiced threats until Mohacks waggled the muzzle of his machine pistol toward the faces of those who were being particularly vehement. On 67, the "mining engineer" shouted, "I protest! This is a libel against me and my planet!"

  "Colonel Ngo," Ran said, making a guess at the passenger's rank, "Trident Starlines doesn't intend to take action through the government of Federated Earth, even though the crewmen bribed to provide access to the arms crated in the hold say they were contacted directly by officials of the Nevasan Embassy on Calicheman."

  That attribution was false, but Ngo—obviously the unit commander—had boarded on Tellichery with the remainder of a team rushed there from Nevasa, packed into a courier vessel. Ngo couldn't be sure that there hadn't been a screw-up on Calicheman, somebody operating directly instead of using cut-outs.

  Given the way the departments of any government hid mistakes from the outside world, the Nevasa military high command would probably go to its individual graves believing that the Nevasan Ministry of External Affairs had blown the hijack. In fact, the plan had been uncovered by a computer sort of the passenger list, looking for anomalies, backed by the paranoid certainty on the part of all the Empress's officers that there was something to find. The Brasil's disappearance had guaranteed that.

  A manual search of hold luggage as it came aboard turned up a capsule marked "DENTAL EQUIPMENT—FRAGILE," which contained weapons for ninety-six troops. In all likelihood, there was an innocent man or woman in the two lifeboats that had been launched, but the poor bastard would play hell proving it.

  And Ran Colville didn't much care.

  "You can't—" Ngo cried.

  "Good day, sir," Ran said sharply. "Mohacks and Babanguida, good luck and I'm looking forward to seeing you soon."

  Mohacks gave Ran an ironic salute, touching the barrel of his weapon to his brow. Babanguida simply grinned.

  "Bridge," Ran ordered, "break contact. Commander, I think that does it."

  Kneale nodded from the screen. "I'll inform Captain Kanawa," he said. His face dissolved into fluorescing speckles.

  There was silence in the machinery room. By now, the passengers had dispersed from the Boat Deck so the corridor was quiet as well.

  "Shit," said one of the Cold Crewmen to Swede. His voice wasn't loud, but there was more hatred in it than Ran had ever heard before in a single syllable. "That's fuckin' it, then?"

  Swede nodded. Why he had that nickname—if it was a nickname—couldn't be guessed. He was a squat, dark Kephalonian, as strong as a troll. "Let's get back to quarters. They've wasted an hour, and they'll expect us to make up the schedule for them. As we will."

  "I was looking forward," the other crewman said, "t' getting stuck in t' some of them pussies."

  He stroked the shaft of his adjustment tool, a three-meter rod with a selection of sharp-edged tools at the head end. The surface of the tool's molecularly-aligned steel was pitted by years of micro-meteor impacts.

  "Another time, Lewis," Swede said. He draped one arm over his subordinate's shoulders and walked him out toward their duty quarters on the deck below. The arc shears hung from Swede's other hand without apparent difficulty.

  The remainder of the team followed. Ran took the submachine guns as the Cold Crewmen left the machinery room. The first man resisted instinctively, but the second tossed the weapon to Ran before Ran was ready for it. The barrels of the two submachine guns clashed together.

  "It's not worth shit anyhow," the crewman said with a sneer. "Next time I bring my tool. See how the pussy screams with my tool sliding through him."

  Ran watched Swede's watch disappear down a drop shaft. He felt wrung out. The guns and bandoliers of ammunition were suddenly too much for his arms to bear. He set them on the deck and began unbuckling his own belt of stun grenades.

  Wanda Holly appeared at the open hatch. She was beaming. "Nice work, sailor," she said.

  "God, Wanda," Ran said. "I feel like I just tended three engines by myself and a double watch besides. And I didn't do anything. I just stood here and waited."

  Wanda bent and picked up the submachine guns. She frowned. "Let's take the service shaft up to A Deck," she said. "We don't want to startle any passengers in one of the regular lifts."

  She leaned over and gave Ran a peck on the cheek. "Not after you and the rest of us did such a job to make sure they won't wake up to a nasty surprise," she added.

  "Let's hope," Ran said, slipping an arm around his fellow officer's waist for support and companionship. "Let's just hope."

  IN TRANSIT:

  TELLICHERY TO TBLISI

  "That's funny," said Yeoman Etcherly. She spoke loudly enough that Bruns, the Second Officer (Ship Side), would hear across the electronic hum of the bridge though she didn't call to him directly.

  Bruns stretched. There were only three of them in the large room at present: Bruns; his helmsman Donaldson; and Etcherly, the navigating technician. That was the normal complement of the starliner's bridge while under way, though Captain Kanawa would inspect at least once during the watch.

  While the Empress of Earth was between destinations, she dipped at regular intervals from sponge space back into the sidereal universe. The vessel's artificial intelligence compared a blink of a wedge of the visible stars against that synthesized from the data base as existing at that point in space. If the two star charts varied, the AI adjusted the attitude and burn of the fusion engines for the next sponge space insertion. For the human bridge crew, the process was as boring as rereading a telephone directory.

  The engines themselves could not be insulated from the series of sponge-space bubbles as the interior of the Empress was. Their thrust had to be delivered in sponge space, using the varied constants of those other universes in order to multiply the vessel's movements against the sidereal universe.

  The men who serviced the engines could work only in the sidereal universe, but they had to remain on the hull throughout their watch. Sending them in and out at each extraction would have multiplied the vessel's transit time. For those men, the Cold Crews, the navigational extractions provided brief minutes of normalcy—albeit hard vacuum and hard work—to punctuate the in-pressing madness of universes to which mankind and life itself were alien.

  "Oh, all right, Etcherly," Bruns said. Mid-watch boredom made him lethargic, unwilling to look at anything new even though he had nothing better—indeed, nothing at all—to do. "What is it that you've got?"

  Etcherly murmured a command. Her console echoed its data onto Bruns's. She was projecting the chart of the most recent navigation check. "It's just . . ." she said. "There's an anomaly. In the upper right quadrant—"

  A red carat on the display noted the point of light—one of literally hundreds of thousands at this degree of detail.

  Before responding, Bruns ran the chart—the realtime display—against the computed synthesis of what the chart should have looked like. Red carats lit all across the display. When the Second Officer corrected for navigationally significant levels of accuracy—10"—the carats disappeared.

  Except for the one Etcherly had noted.

  Bruns shrugged. "Right," he said. "It's an anomaly. One bit of space junk that's too small to be entered in the data base. It's a big universe, Etcherly, but it's not so big that we're going to have it completely to ourselves every time we come out of sponge space."

  Donaldson, the helmsman, didn't move while Bruns and the navigating tech were speaking. His eyes were open, but Bruns sometimes had the impression that the helm
sman was capable of sending his soul light years away until recalled by an unexpected requirement or the end of his watch.

  "Yessir," said Etcherly, "but see—"

  The displays, hers and Bruns' together, flickered through the whole run of navigational checks since the watch began three hours previously. The star charts differed wildly from one to the next. Not only were the glimpses separated by great distances, but also the shortest transit through bubbles of sponge space traced a path in no particular order through the sidereal universe. The only constant in the varying stellar panoramas was the anomaly carated in the upper right-hand quadrant.

  "Oh," said Bruns. "That's odd."

  He rubbed his lips with the knuckles of his right hand. "It's either a problem with the sensors, or a problem with the data base. Frankly, neither one thrills me."

  "Bridge says the hardware's okay," Etcherly said. "It says the software's okay, too, but I guess it would. I mean, if there's a problem, it's a problem with Bridge, isn't it?"

  Officer and technician stared at one another. The red marks on their displays pulsed softly in unison.

  "It's a ship," said Donaldson unexpectedly. He didn't turn his head in the direction of either of the others on the bridge.

  "That's impossible!" Bruns snapped. "We've been in and out of sponge space forty times this watch. We couldn't possibly have matched courses so closely with another vessel."

  "The lifeboats," Etcherly said, staring at the display in sudden surmise. "Could one of them have been picked up when we jumped from Tellichery?"

  "No," Bruns said flatly. He rubbed his mouth again. "We weren't within ten-to-the-twelfth meters when we made the initial insertion. Besides, you don't just 'pick things up' when you insert into sponge space."

  He shrugged. "It's a fault in the system and my money's on the sensors, whatever Bridge has to say about it. We'll get it taken care of on Tblisi, they've got full docking facilities. But it's not a serious problem."