Starliner

by David Drake

  "It's a ship," Donaldson repeated. "It's matching course with us. And it's getting closer."

  Bruns glared at Donaldson. The helmsman ignored him. He was staring at his own display, a gentle swirl with the delicacy of a mandala. Donaldson's duties were to maneuver the Empress of Earth in the sidereal universe. In sponge space, as now, he could not have anything to do.

  "That's nonsense," the Second Officer said sharply. "Besides, you can't tell relative distances without triangulating. Since the—the anomaly's at the same point, we can't triangulate."

  Donaldson wasn't looking at either Bruns's display or that of the navigating tech, except possibly from the corners of his eyes. He couldn't possibly have anything useful to add to the discussion.

  "Should we inform Captain Kanawa?" Etcherly asked softly.

  "I . . ." the Second Officer mumbled past his clenched fist. He lowered his hand sharply. "No," he said. "That is, we'll inform him when he leaves his quarters. But he wasn't sleeping for the three days before we got rid of the—the hijackers in Tellichery orbit. He didn't say much about it, but he's been worried since we learned about the Brazil."

  A muted alarm purred, warning that the Empress of Earth was about to drop back into the sidereal universe for another navigational check. Bruns blanked his display in preparation.

  "Now that he's able to sleep again," he said aloud, "I think we ought to let him."

  The new starscape flashed onto the screens. For a moment, it was a rosy blur of highlights. Then, as the artificial intelligence adjusted to navigational parameters, there was only one red carat, high in the right-hand quadrant of either display.

  * * *

  "Pretty hard lines for the fellows they dumped into orbit that way," Da Silva said, staring morosely at the twisted fabric of sponge space beyond the wall of the Starlight Bar. "Damned high-handed. Even if they were right, I mean, and I don't think they didn't make some mistakes, artificial intelligences or no."

  Dewhurst nodded. "I keep thinking, what if I'd been one of the poor bastards?" he said. "I'd be—well, Trident Starlines would regret it, you can well believe."

  "I think . . ." Wade said judiciously. He cocked an eye up at the traveling display which falsely showed the Brasil en route from Nevasa to Earth. ". . . that I'd prefer to be in a lifeboat above Tellichery than in whatever holding facility the Brazil's passengers are detained. Some desert world, very likely. I doubt they'll be harmed deliberately . . . but they'll be concealed for however long the Grantholm-Nevasa War goes on."

  Belgeddes swirled his ice. "And better than what happened on the Delilah, hey Dickie?"

  Wade grimaced. He stood up and walked closer to the bulkhead, staring out at alien nothingness. "I don't like to talk about the Delilah," he said. "You know that, Tom."

  "Would another drink help?" Dewhurst asked sardonically. He plugged his chip into the autobar and dialed another round, though Da Silva was still nursing his rum.

  To his surprise, Wade didn't take the fresh whiskey.

  "He didn't have any choice, you understand," Belgeddes said apologetically. "They were Free-Will Consecrants, with a bomb big enough to blow the whole ship to kingdom come if Dickie hadn't opened the compartment to vacuum."

  "Well, do what you have to and don't brood on it," Wade said with a stiff chuckle as he turned at last to the drink. "I mean, they had as much chance as I did to get to the lock to the next compartment, didn't they?"

  He stood with his foot on a chair seat, a spare old man with a consciously dashing expression. He could have modeled for a whiskey ad. Dewhurst had no doubt that Wade was an actor of some sort.

  "They didn't have suits, then?" Da Silva said with narrowing eyes.

  "None of us had suits," Wade explained. "They'd decided they were going to create their own Eden by hijacking the Delilah to some planet back of beyond. Everybody else was going along whether they liked it or not—and I was the only one in Compartment 3 who wasn't a Consecrant."

  "The Delilah was a trainship," Belgeddes said. "The internal passage to the rest of the ship was blocked during the hijacking, but each segment had its own airlock as well. I was playing cards with the Second Officer, I'm happy to say."

  He shook his head with an approving smile. "Crawling around the hull of a starship without so much as a suit—that's Dickie's sort of business, not mine."

  Da Silva shuddered and turned his head.

  "That," Dewhurst said distinctly, "is not only impossible, it's sick."

  "Scarcely impossible, friend," Wade replied. "The airlocks were in the same position on each segment, so there wasn't any searching around for me to do."

  He shrugged. "I won't quarrel with 'sick.' But there it is."

  Da Silva jumped up, overturning his fresh drink when his knee slammed the underside of the table.

  "What's wrong?" Dewhurst cried as he slid his own chair back.

  "A ship!" Da Silva said. "I swear I saw another ship out there! Just for a moment!"

  He turned to look at his companions. To his amazement, Wade and Belgeddes had already left the bar.

  * * *

  The Empress of Earth dropped out of sponge space for the forty-seventh navigational check since undocking from Tellichery. Second Officer Bruns and his navigational technician held their breath, while Donaldson blinked at the slowly rotating pattern he ran on his screen until called on to oversee a maneuver.

  Bridge completed its check and flashed up the star chart.

  "Clean!" Etcherly said. Then, as though Bruns weren't staring at the same display on his own console, she added, "The anomaly's gone!"

  "We'll still get it checked in Tblisi," the watch officer said with more emphasis than he'd been able to muster during the period of uncertainty over the starliner's navigational system. "Something like that, even a little transient, might turn out to be serious."

  "What might turn out to be serious?" asked Captain Kanawa as he walked onto the bridge. He looked as fit and rested as he had since the Empress lifted from Earth, though the pockets of skin around his eyes still looked unusually hollow.

  "Ah, sir . . ." said Bruns. Kanawa wasn't one of those captains who expected the crew to come to attention when they entered the bridge, but he did expect complete answers to any questions he asked about the watch. "There was a flaw in, I think the sensors, causing an anomaly in the star charts during several observations. Yeoman Etcherly pointed it out, and I've logged it for correction at our next docking."

  Kanawa noted it without evident concern. He walked over to his own console and said, "Status."

  The starliner's running display came up at once. Changes since the most recent check were highlighted. Normally the watch officer had the status report on at all times. Bruns hadn't looked at it since Etcherly noted the anomaly before the previous observation, but it all seemed pretty standard—

  "Why's the engineering hatch open?" Kanawa demanded. "Has the Cold Crew had an accident?"

  "Bridge to Engineering," Bruns said without hesitating an instant. "Why are—"

  The Second Officer's demand through the AI automatically switched the upper right corner of his screen to visuals from the target location, in this case the engineering control room. An engineering officer—Crosse on second watch—waited there while the Cold Crewmen under his titular command were out on the hull.

  Instead of the bored-looking engineer Bruns expected to see, the visual pickup showed a room full of men in spacesuits. During watch changes, the engineering control room was sealed off from the rest of the starliner. It formed a large airlock so that all eight men of the Cold Crew watch could enter and leave the vessel in a batch, instead of being passed through the hull one at a time through the normal lock.

  There were far more than eight men in the large room now. It looked like twenty or thirty, and more suited figures were climbing down the access ladder from the hull.

  They all carried guns.

  "What's that?" Kanawa cried, looking over the watch officer's shoulder in
surprise instead of switching his own display to the scene. "Mister Crosse, what's going on?"

  There was no response. Since the engineering control room was airless, the suited men couldn't even hear the blurted question.

  "Docking display," the helmsman said to his console.

  The mandala shrank inward and reformed as a synthesized external view of the Empress of Earth. Beside the huge starliner was a much smaller vessel of nondescript appearance.

  "A Type Two-Oh-Three hull from the Excelsior Dockyards on Grantholm," Donaldson said, identifying the vessel—a short-haul trader in normal usage—aloud.

  As he spoke, the Empress concluded its navigational checks and reentered sponge space. The schematic of the starliner itself remained on the helmsman's display, but that of the Type 203 freighter twisted into a complex of lines surrounding the holographic Empress in all three dimensions. Data from the sensors that Bridge used to create the schematic were skewed unintelligibly by the alien universe in which they now functioned.

  "I've heard about people docking in sponge space," Donaldson said approvingly. "But I never thought I'd see it happen. Of course, if they'd tried to match with us in star space, we'd have had warning and got out of the way."

  Bruns wiped the chart. Visuals from the engineering control room expanded to fill his whole display. The external hatch must have closed, because the figures in the room unlatched their helmets.

  "Bridge," Captain Kanawa ordered crisply, "notify the passengers and crew of an emergency. The Empress has been boarded by a force of armed men who must be assumed to be—"

  In the engineering control room, a woman with her scalp shaved and eyes like hatchets aimed a back-pack laser at the engineering console. The last thing the pick-up in the control room showed was the blue-white glare that vaporized its circuitry.

  "—hostile," Captain Kanawa finished in a dry voice.

  * * *

  "You know . . ." Ran Colville said.

  He paused as he and Wanda Holly passed one of the many alcoves set back from the Enchanted Forest's curving central aisle. The whispers behind the screen of exotic vegetation stopped at the sound of the officers' measured footsteps on the parquet floor.

  "I thought when I was assigned to the Empress," Ran continued when he was a comfortable distance from the couple hidden in the alcove, "that the duty was going to be cut-and-dried compared to what I was used to on smaller ships. Tense, because of so many people and powerful ones. But dull."

  Wanda chuckled. "Well, we've still got half the voyage to go," she said. "Maybe the return leg will be dull. I'd like to think so."

  "I'll settle for getting safe to Tblisi," Ran said soberly. "One step at a time."

  They were both off duty, so there was nothing technically improper for them to be together; but the Enchanted Forest was the most private of the ship's open spaces, something that had affected Ran's suggestion for a place to walk and perhaps Wanda's agreement The park-like lounge contained real tropical vegetation from the worlds on which the starliner touched down, blended in with holographic panels of the corresponding animal life. The result was a score of bowers, set off privately from one another and from the aisle.

  A three-tonne amphibian eyed Ran and Wanda from a bed of tall Grantholm reeds. The holographic beast worked its jaws forward and back, grinding the coarse fibers into a pulp that bacteria in its gut would convert into energy.

  Ran nodded toward the image. "Not a very romantic setting, is it?" he said/asked.

  "Speak for yourself," Wanda replied with a careful lack of emphasis.

  The officers' communications modules chimed together.

  "All passengers must return to their cabins at once," the ship's public address system said from several points in the Forest's hidden moldings. The speakers' varied distances from those listening turned simultaneous phrases into a series of sibilant echoes. "Do not use Corridor Four. All passengers—"

  Ran whirled around, trying to find a sightline for his commo unit which leaves didn't block. Wanda, more experienced with the layout of the Empress of Earth, had already knelt on the parquetry.

  "Go ahead," Ran snapped, letting Bridge's voice analyzer identify him without further delay.

  A couple lurched through a shield of spike-leafed vegetation from which a Hobilo carnivore leered. The woman was slim and attractive, but at least twenty years older than her teenaged companion. His fly was undone because in haste he had caught his shirttail in the pressure seal.

  "This is an emergency," Bridge said needlessly. "Unknown persons have entered the vessel through the engineering hatch. All crew members must act to prevent injury to the vessel's passengers. Await further orders. Out."

  The mildly concerned synthesized tones undercut the import of the words. Instead of gently urging the listener, the smooth voice introduced a level of cognitive dissonance which increased the terror of broken routine.

  "The hell with that!" said Wanda Holly as Ran looked up from the message he'd heard a moment after she'd received it. "Can't we stop them?"

  More couples were drifting out of the foliage. The officers' white uniforms drew their eyes like needles to lodestone.

  "It's all right, ladies and gentlemen," Ran said loudly. The tannoys continued to drone their message, increasing nervousness by repetition without any real information. "Some people from Grantholm want to redirect the ship. There's no physical danger whatever, so long as you keep out of their way."

  "Go to your cabins at once," Wanda added with calm certainty. "We'll let you know what the situation is as soon as we can, certainly within an hour. But right now, you've got to get out of the way."

  "But—" said at least five passengers simultaneously.

  "Move it!" Ran snapped. He made shooing motions with his hands. "This is as real as lifeboat drill, it's just not as uncomfortable."

  Wanda unexpectedly unsealed her tunic. She wore a translucent bodysock beneath it, Ran noted with surprise.

  "Sir, madam?" the Second Officer said to a couple surprised from the semblance of a Calicheman riverbank. The screen of dense-trunked trees grew from a common root system. Behind it, beasts the size of hippopotami sported. "Mr. Colville and I need your jackets at once."

  She glanced over at Ran. "This isn't any time to stick out like sore thumbs, whatever we want to do."

  The two passengers addressed obeyed the sharp command without objecting or even speaking, though the man's mouth opened and closed like that of a carp gulping air. The dozen or so other passengers acted as though a flag had dropped. Their shift toward the door to the corridor became a dead run within three steps.

  The man who gave Ran his jacket of pink and puce velour reached for the uniform tunic in exchange. Ran set his hand over the passenger's.

  "You don't want this either," Ran said. His voice quivered like the wire of a cheese-cutter.

  The passenger jerked away and rushed out of the room, hand in hand with his companion. They didn't look back.

  Ran tossed his white tunic into an alcove. Wanda slipped a small pistol from the sidepocket of her own garment to that of her borrowed one, then hid the uniform with Ran's.

  He knelt as the Second Officer had done before. "Colville to Kneale," he said with the transceiver tight against the inlaid wood. "Over."

  "How do you know it's Grantholmers?" Wanda demanded, backing into the shelter of the reeds as she looked toward the entrance to the Enchanted Forest Her right hand was in her pocket.

  "Bridge, where the hell is the commander!" Ran shouted.

  "Commander Kneale is not aboard the vessel," Bridge said through the disk. "He vanished from his cabin when I sounded the alarm. Over."

  "It says he vanished!" Ran blurted to his companion. "You can't vanish from a starship!"

  What you could do was die. If a crewman in Grantholm pay had hidden bombs in the officers' quarters to go off in concert with an external attack, for example.

  Ran and Wanda saw understanding in each others' sudden hardening of
expression. Neither of them spoke the realization aloud.

  "They'll have the arms locker by now," Ran said. "It's on the Engineering Deck, a hundred meters from the Cold Crew hatch they used. I've got my pistol and that cannon we picked up on Calicheman in my cabin, but they'll probably have somebody on Corridor Twelve by now . . . ."

  "We'll try," Wanda said in sharp decision. "We need more than one pop-gun, that's for sure."

  Her face suddenly fell into a hard smile. "And it's Grantholm rather than Nevasa because the Nevasans were going to hijack the Empress from inside. That means if there's a sponge-space commando attacking, it's from Grantholm."

  "Excuse us?" a voice called from the direction of the corridor entrance. The person speaking was hidden by vegetation between him and the officers on the curved aisle. "Lieutenants? We're coming toward you. Your ship's artificial intelligence said you were here."

  Wanda drew her pistol. Ran stepped deliberately in front of her, hiding the weapon from sight.

  "What is it?" he demanded sharply.

  A lanky old man stepped around the stand of Grantholm reeds. It was a passenger Ran had met the day the Empress undocked from Earth: Wade, Richard Wade, and his plump cabinmate Belgeddes trailed behind him.

  "A Grantholm commando has invaded your ship, Mr. Colville," Wade said. He gave a courtly nod to recognize Wanda as well. "And we thought you might like our help in doing something about it."

  * * *

  "You want to what?" Wanda Holly said.

  "Thinks we're a couple silly old buffers, Dickie," Belgeddes said, shaking his head sadly. "Well, I suppose we can't blame her."

  The plump old man put his index finger to the throat of his tunic and opened it to an undershirt of some bleached natural fiber.

  "Gentlemen," said Ran Colville, "please get to your cabin at once. Ms. Holly and I—"

  "They'll have somebody in officers' country by now," Wade said, "the Grantholmers will. They won't have had time to search the cabins this quick, though. The two of you head that way, they'll come down on you like lizards on a beetle. But if it's you and I sauntering down the hall, Ms. Holly—well, an old fart and his popsy won't ring any alarm bells in whoever's on guard, will we?"