by Stephen Hunt
With each other for company, the robots seemed to have forgotten about their human charge, and Calder groaned, following after the duo as they marched beside the glass of the viewing gallery, little flashes of cerulean light flashing off their metalwork. Catching up, Calder stepped into a lift with the maintenance units. Then he sank through the decks, an archaeologist’s excavation of layered shielding – geological layers of concrete sandwiched between layers of alloy steel, diamond composite, sand, water, air, self-healing fibre-reinforced ceramics, until he reached the Engineering Command Housing core, or ECHO core, in fleet parlance. For most starships, the ECHO core was the most important part of the vessel – all that separated a functional space vessel from being a couple of million tonnes of metal coffin stranded parsecs from civilisation at worse, or a new satellite trapped in a world’s gravity well at best.
The Gravity Rose possessed a four-storey chamber, a large central atrium surrounded by rises of railinged decks connected by a nest of walkways, gantries and lifts – some designed for human crew, many more arranged for the hundreds of mechanicals moving around the space. The robots rolled between consoles and the banks of instruments, tending them with all the care farmers showed growing crops in the greenhouses of Hesperus. There was none of the information overload of the bridge here for Calder could see. No storm of flashy icons and hologram schematics, the walls reassuringly solid rather than a skeleton interspersed with the star-spattered void, the banks of consoles comfortingly mechanical. At the centre of the atrium, rising up towards Calder as the lift descended, stood one nod toward modernity – a gigantic table that could have seated a company of marines, but instead was attended by a single man in ubiquitous green crew overalls. He paced its length with the intensity of a field marshal, the hologram landscape across the tabletop not one of military formations, but the hills and valleys of drive cores and reactor piles, portions rising like volcanoes to demand his attention. Circling the table as if they were engaged in a race, a small army of robots rolled, stepped and hovered in holding patterns, waiting for the man to jab a finger towards them, his mouth issuing commands unheard by Calder inside the whining lift. With orders tossed at them in this seemingly derisory manner, a robot that had been singled out would peel away and head off to do the officer’s bidding. Calder’s diminutive escort waddled out of the lift first, the open door flooding the lift with the sounds of organised chaos outside. He stepped out after them. It smelled like an oil driller’s cabin – either that or a cop garage. Burning grease. Ionisation in the air, robot exertions, machine frictions. The ever-present whiff of great energies being released in distant chambers.
Up until now giving Zack Paopao the title of Drive Chief was superfluous, as he’d had no human crew to boss around. With Calder’s arrival, that was about to change. The twin R4 units halted outside the roller-derby circling the chief’s last stand, observing it with the cool detachment of race referees. Calder walked across to stand just beyond the looping train of robots. Some were little more than crab-sized steel shells with antenna flickering as they jolted along on hidden wheels, other robots taller than the R4s, tractor-tracked cabinets beeping and hooting between themselves, spindly beanpoles with binocular-shaped heads above whipping nests of metal tentacles.
Chief Paopao was either ignoring Calder or oblivious to his existence. He stood five and half feet tall, his round Chinese face sporting a trim goatee beard and a dark bushy mane of hair running to silver. It was hard to peg a person’s true age with life extension treatments, but Paopao looked old – maybe late fifties or early sixties. In alliance space, the chief could have been celebrating his half-millennium birthday and Calder would have been none the wiser. Life extensions were prohibitively expensive, the genetic wizardry of resetting human telomere DNA a treatment that could only be initiated so many times – not to mention a closely guarded secret among a select network of laboratories; one practised in exchange for disgustingly large amounts of money. But there was something about the chief that spoke of age, of weariness, of tiredness – or was it just the stink of a man who had been defeated by life once too often? Was it the hunched way he leant over the control table? Harried flicks of his fingers across the control surface, pinpointing nascent problems he had fixed a hundred times before. Or the wiry compactness of his body – as though every inch of fat and waste had been sucked away by a life weighted too long with labours? With nothing to do but brood between sim episodes, the stench of failure was an odour Calder worried might be clinging to his body. When the chief turned around and finally deigned to acknowledge the newcomer’s presence, the look Calder received was curiously familiar. Where have I seen that before? Oh yes, the glance his father had shot Calder when the military council arrived bringing news of his older brother Brander’s death on the battlefield and the unexpected tidings that Calder Durk was now heir to the whole kingdom. A mixture of fear and fascination.
‘Ah, well,’ announced the chief. ‘It is my fault, really. I ask for extra help and this is my punishment. One of Rex Matobo’s favours, only the learning of a couple of sim episodes away from planting an axe through one of my reactor plates for fear it’s possessed by demons.’
Calder was going to point out that one of the sim sessions had been Hell Fleet, but on balance, he didn’t think that would reassure the officer. ‘Calder Durk at your service, chief. I’ve left my axe at home.’
Paopao made a curious sounding tutting under his breath. ‘I count my blessings.’ As Paopao reached down to tap the control table, Calder noted an animated tattoo wriggling along the chief’s left forearm. With the officer’s shirtsleeves rolled up, Calder watched a crimson phoenix with a missile clutched in its talons growing smaller as it orbited a moon, before rushing out and smashing through a number four. That’s the unit insignia of the Fourth Fleet. So, Zack Paopao had done Hell Fleet the hard way – in real-time, rather than via sim. Calder remembered Zeno’s prohibition about questioning the crew about their lives before the ship, but where was the harm in trying to bond with this hermit of the drive rooms?
‘You were in the Fighting Fourth?’
Paopao grunted dismissively. ‘If you had been on real jump carrier, not that public relations joke that Zeno carries around, you would know deck apes usually call it the Fleeing Fourth.’
‘Public relations joke?’
‘Fleet has PR hacks attached to the show’s design team, as well as technical aides from navy. Icons on a bridge’s warfare boards might be one hundred percent accurate in show, but all else is recruiting poster puffery. It’s called Fleeing Fourth because no alliance fleet has retreated more or lost a greater number of lives in action.’ Paopao jabbed angrily at the control table before his fingers encompassed the three robots he expected to hop to his orders. ‘Plasma realignment on number five tokomak. Full repair instructions are logged in the local queue on level two. Go.’ He turned back to Calder. ‘Officers call it Fleeting Fourth, however. For fleeting tenure of careers there. Which is why I am here. Look around, boy—’ his hand encompassed the ECHO core. ‘On your joke show, there were four hundred and twenty six ratings and officers in the carrier’s drive rooms, working three shifts across twenty-four hours. Numbers are right. Details always are – although never the spirit. What do I have? A crew of oilers. And now you. Rest of them float around Gravity Rose, issuing directives as though they are in the court of the Han Emperor. And where do orders end up? Here, mostly. But you will see. You will see where real work is done on this vessel. You with your sword and your two sims and your Fighting Fourth.’
I left my sword behind, too. ‘Where do you want me to start?’
‘Over there,’ said the chief. He pointed to a thick curtain with woodblock prints from the Confucian Analects hanging down to make a wall in front of a compartment just off the central atrium. ‘Instructions inside for you, too.’
‘We’re getting ready to make a jump,’ said Calder, walking away from the command table. ‘To somewhere called Transfer
ence. That’s what Zeno says.’
‘Big world,’ said Paopao. ‘Old world, too, with large station in orbit. More station than orbit, these days. Lots of traffic. Captain Fiveworlds always finds a cargo at Transference.’ He laughed. A raw, bitter sound. ‘Not always a legal cargo. But then, Transference is not always a legal place.’
Not legal. Calder didn’t like the sound of that. He had imagined his new life as a peaceful exile. That was the whole point of banishment, wasn’t it? Your old existence ripped out from under your snowshoes while you were dispatched to some distant village on a faraway shore where catching a fish in an ice hole was news most weeks. That old fraud Matobo the Magnificent hadn’t passed him from the frying pan to the fire, had he? Besides, Calder had spent long enough as a federal agent to know that you didn’t want to be pulling the kind of shizzle that would bring the Hard TAP knocking on your airlock door. Lifting aside the curtain, Calder was surprised to discover the space behind – little more than an annexe formed by the overhang of the engineering deck above – had been made into a makeshift den. There was a cot pushed against the walls, rugs thrown on the metal decking, plastic warehouse shelving filled with clothes and personal items. A door led through to a bathroom, and against one wall, a long bank of domestic appliances that would have had an Amish farmer flagellating his spine with a horsewhip in disgusted envy. It wasn’t a part of the engine room’s original specification, not if the makeshift orange butane bottles piled near the cooker were any guide.
‘You actually live here? You do know there a couple of thousand spare liner-grade cabins on the other side of the radiation shield?’
Paopao turned from the command table and stamped a boot on the deck. ‘Covered by insufficient liner-grade hull armour and a two petawatt deflector field. Here we are safe. X-ray laser head missiles and kinetic-kill shells may detonate off our surface and we will feel not a tremor inside the drive rooms. There are only two rules a wise man must observe, Mister Fighting Fourth. One: never leave drive rooms. Two: never get off ship. Nothing but trouble, every time I leave drive rooms.’ He pointed to a space under a deck opposite his own, still filled with console banks and robots moving to and fro. ‘Have R4s clear that one out, take blankets and what you need from passenger levels. You may stay here. I will not tell others. You will be out of their hair. They can scheme and plot and smuggle and hustle across void and you will no longer notice or care. There is always work here. Always work.’
‘I think I’ve grown attached to the cabin they’ve given me near the bridge,’ said Calder. The one in Sane Land. He could hear Zeno and Lana laughing right now. ‘Where are the instructions you spoke of?’
Paopao made that loud, disapproving tutting again as he left the table and approached the quarters. ‘You will be day pupil among boarders should you commute here each day. Robots will know. They always do.’ He sighed sadly, at a perceived lack of wisdom in the ship’s latest crewmember. ‘Instructions are on cooker. How to cook rice and make ochazuke.’
Sim service in the fleet wasn’t quite matching up to the reality of shipboard life for Calder. ‘I could program a robot to do that for you every day.’
‘Pah. You teach an oiler to cook for you, you do not eat food. You consume fuel. Oilers like Zeno, high functioning AIs, they possess enough subtlety to steam rice. But they are too smart to want to.’
Unlike the greenhorn rescued from an ice-age colonial disaster. I guess exiles don’t get to select their duty. He went over to the cooker. It wasn’t anything like the gleaming auto-cooking slabs of steel inside the main mess. Four gas hobs sitting over an old school induction oven. No LED panels, no voice command functions, no floating screen with a library of automated recipes. No reader to recognize the RFID chips in a meal packet. No five-second ration-pack heat-ups. No pulse cooking or wave boiling. There was a laminated sheet of instructions taped to the side of the cooker. Make ochazuke: (1) Steam rice for ten minutes with bruised stick of lemon grass. (2) Add ho-ji cha tea, sprinkle on pickled plum and mitsuba. (3) Add jako. (4) Scatter top with bonito flakes. Each ingredient was sitting in a porcelain jar, labels scrawled in both Chinese and Lingual.
‘The way you cook your food reflects the way you live,’ lectured the chief as Calder blundered around his makeshift personal space, searching for pans and water and checking the jars for ingredients. ‘Rice is born in water and must die in ho-ji cha, in tea.’
Calder had come from a society where most meals stank of ice-whale blubber and oil, where vegetables under glass were as expensive as the fuel it took to heat them through to harvest. So far, Calder had been content to be surprised at every sitting by the variety of food on offer. Hermetically sealed meal packs from hundreds of cultures and worlds and nations; flavours richer and more exotic than anything he could have imagined. But faced with a simple meal of natural rice, tea and jako fish – none of which had survived the cold march of Hesperus’s glaciers, even if they had existed at the start of the world’s lost hot spell – Calder came to appreciate that, in this one matter of culinary skill, Zack Paopao wasn’t quite as eccentric as he appeared at first glance. Back home, Calder would probably enter the historian’s scrolls as the callow prince who had lost a thousand warships and sealed the hegemony of the Narvalaks over the world. Up here, at least, he’d enter the rolls as the crewman who could steam rice and put up with the drive chief’s half-crazy manners long enough to master an antimatter pile and hyperspace matrix. The meal was finished in less than half an hour. Zack Paopao sat opposite Calder, both of them crouched cross-legged at a table so short it might as well have been a wooden wheel resting on the rug below.
The chief scooped rice into his mouth with chopsticks while his neo-barbarian houseguest used a metal teaspoon. ‘Sufficient,’ opined the chief. ‘A man who steams good rice may be trusted with the care of antiproton storage ring.’
‘Is that in the fleet manual?’
‘Found it inside fortune cookie on station above Kunjing Four.’
‘Do you have any idea how crazy that sounds?’
‘Pah, you have not talked much with other crew yet, then, if you think that Chief Paopao is the crazy one on board Gravity Rose.’
No, I suppose I haven’t at that. ‘Well, I know you’re not mad from your service with the fleet. They’ve got entire hospital ships full of medical virus to take care of stress and combat disorders.’
‘Only if you submit to them, Mister Fighting Fourth. Sometimes it beholdens a man to remember.’
‘Like where you got that tattoo?’
‘A mistake. Service with the fleet often is. All a mistake.’
Paopao didn’t say any more and Calder sure didn’t feel like he had any right to push further. Must have been one hell of a mistake, to end up swapping the company of a well-resourced finely tuned legion of engine men and drive hands on a carrier for lonely duty at the ass end of an independent trading rust-bucket. ‘And ending up here was chance, just like with me?’
‘Yes. Much like you.’ The chief halted eating, a chopstick hovering thoughtfully in the air above the meal. ‘This ship collects lost souls. At first, I thought it was Captain Fiveworlds collecting us. But later, I realise, it is the ship herself.’
‘The ship’s computer isn’t rated anywhere near an artificial intelligence level.’
‘Of course not,’ said Paopao. ‘I would not fly on a wilful ship. Yet, still, the Gravity Rose collects us. Even Captain Fiveworlds was harvested.’
‘I understood the Gravity Rose had been passed down the family line; a business and a vessel both?’ That, at least, was something Calder could understand. Many a merchantman back home had been passed on as a child’s inheritance, wooden decks on an ice schooner absorbing the blood and sweat of forty generations of the same family before finally being gnawed out by iron weevils, soaked in oil and burnt for fuel.
‘Passed on by distant uncle that Lana Fiveworlds had never heard of or met before? A couple of billion dollars worth of generosity. With so
much money, you think this uncle would have taken trouble to father at least one heir. That’s what clones are for, if all else fails.’
The chief was beginning to sound crazy again. Madness leaking in from between the plates of his reactors. He didn’t like the way the chief was impugning Lana Fiveworlds, either. ‘What do you believe happened?’
‘This vessel is not right. And I say this as someone who has slid void on dozens or more ships of line and tramp freighters. Pah, she looks right, on the surface. A grand old lady who huffs and puffs for every one of her seven supposed centuries. Modules from here, hull extensions from there, just like a real ship would grow over the ages. Lucky cargo-run two hundred years ago to coincide with refurbished navigation system. Known parts and manufacturers. But when things get tough for the Gravity Rose, when our environment turns to what the fleet calls aggressive space, target rich and hostile heavy, then her act is dropped and coughing lady is replaced by courtesan assassin. A little too fleet of foot and fast in processing speeds for her ranking.’
