The Sea is Full of Stars wos-6

by Jack L. Chalker

  Ming nodded. “I noticed the same thing. The Rithians are all from the Ha’jiz Nesting, for example. And the middle-aged man with the good looks and silver hair and the woman in the sparkling scarlet are the Kharkovs. Gem cutters and master jewelers. That’s no coincidence.”

  “I agree,” Ari replied. “And there are others here who are even a bit darker. That Geldorian, for example, is Tann Nakitt. He’s a go-between for various factions, whether it be companies or criminal groups or whatever. Not a bad sort, really, unless you’re opposed to him, but he’s also not cheap. I don’t know the Mallegestors, nor much about them as a race or culture, but it’s curious to see them this far afield. Assuming we can discount Mom and Dad and the two kids there, the distinguished-looking fellow with the goatee and the two overbuilt young ladies is Jules Wallinchky, a man who makes a lot of money providing goods and services to folks who want things they can’t legally have. I assume that the two with him are either recent acquisitions or kept because of their looks and attitude, although you never know.

  Makes for an interesting mostly rogue’s gallery, though, doesn’t it?”

  Angel recognized the man identified as the gangster as the one who had tried coming on to her until she did her ungainly spill. I sure attract the odd ones, she thought sourly, although she wondered what interest he might have in the likes of her, with two superior warm bodies like those hanging on his every word and gesture. On the other hand, maybe he was looking for a woman who wouldn’t pass a light beam in one ear and out the other. She’d never seen women like this, and only heard of them in stories and warnings; she did not understand why they would put themselves in that kind of situation, as little more than, well, property. She knew some faiths had women subordinated because of Eve’s corruption, but this had nothing to do with religion or true culture. To Angel Kobe, it was as inexplicable as the bipedal hippos over there, the Mallegestors.

  “Well, I don’t care what the rules are,” Wallinchky said loud enough for all to hear. “If the Captain’s gonna stand us all up without so much as a word, he can damned well come find me when he wants to talk. I’ll give him five minutes and that’s it. Then we’re goin’ to the cabin!”

  Tough guy or not, this sentiment was pretty much universal for the assembled passengers.

  Jeremiah Kincaid arose, his huge form towering over the Terrans and Rithians, and made his way silently through the increasingly impatient throng to the restaurant. As soon as he stepped inside, the maitre d’ appeared.

  “The Captain has allowed the passengers to wait without sending any word for more than a half hour,” Kincaid told the hologram in his deep baritone. “Please check and see if there is anything wrong.”

  The maitre d’ seemed to freeze, but Kincaid’s words went through the generated character to the central module computer and from there to the master computer. Suddenly the hologram came to life once more, looking concerned. “We do not have a clear fix on Captain Dukodny. This is unprecedented. Validate that you are Jeremiah Wong Kincaid, passenger?”

  “Yes, I am Kincaid.”

  “Do you still hold captain’s papers?”

  “Yes, although I couldn’t legally take command without going through a recertification. It has been a long time since I was master of anything large and complex, and technology has gone on.”

  “Captain, you are the most qualified individual other than Captain Dukodny aboard. We would like you to go up to the bridge and see if there has been some kind of problem we cannot monitor.”

  Kincaid nodded. “That is what I had in mind. What do your sensors see on the bridge?”

  “Normal operation is reported, although there is some sort of weight imbalance we can not properly categorize.”

  Kincaid frowned. “Weight imbalance? You mean at the bridge?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Wait here a moment. Then we will go up there.”

  Kincaid turned and walked back to the people in the lounge, most of whom reacted nervously or recoiled from his powerful and mysterious visage.

  “Citizens of the Realm, there might be a problem here,” he announced as loudly as possible. “I would not feel bound to wait around here any longer. On the other hand, I should like a couple of volunteers to accompany me to the bridge to check on the Captain. I fear he may be ill or worse.”

  That got a lot of them agitated, and he moved to calm them down. “Please! This ship runs without live intervention. The ship’s Master is the boss, but doesn’t run the day-to-day operations. I am rated as captain and could do what little is necessary in a pinch, but this ship not only can do everything by itself, it has three to five levels of redundancy. There is no danger to us from that quarter. Still, something is amiss. Would anyone like to accompany me? Anyone?”

  He wasn’t exactly the kind you willingly jumped up and volunteered to go off with into the internal bowels of a strange ship. Most of them would have preferred if he sat in a different room. Still, curiosity overcame a few of the courageous.

  “I’ll go up with you,” said a Rithian, perhaps the one, Angel thought, she had talked to about Kincaid. The cobra-faced quadruped was welcome, because Rithians were so supple they could twist and bend as if they had no bones and get in and out of tight places.

  “Fine. And one more?”

  “I’ll come with you,” Angel heard herself saying. Was she the same person who had not long before been terrified at the very sight of this man? Perhaps being herself was always best; that way she could place herself in God’s hands.

  Kincaid wasn’t too thrilled with her, but he didn’t want to wait much longer. “All right. You two come with me. Everybody else, stay or go as you please. We’ll report as soon as we know anything.”

  They walked back over to the restaurant. The maitre d’ was nowhere in sight. Instead they were met by a tall, tough-looking man in a utility jumpsuit. This was crewman mode, and meant that this particular hologram wasn’t from the module computer but from the City of Modar itself.

  In addition to curiosity, Angel had volunteered because it looked to be a chance to see the parts of the ship otherwise barred to passengers.

  They walked back along utilitarian service corridors that had no mystery in them at all except perhaps where they went, and finally the trio reached a stair that descended from the ceiling as they approached. Without the computer authorizing things, nobody could have gotten up there or even noticed that the stairway existed. This was Officer Country, even though there was only one officer on the whole massive structure.

  They went up it, the holographic crewman and Kincaid in the lead, then the Rithian, with Angel bringing up the rear. They came to an airlock with its warning lights flashing red.

  “That’s odd,” the crewman commented. “Our sensors indicate that the external corridor is fully pressurized.”

  Kincaid looked around. “Any emergency gear here?”

  “In the compartment there. Just use the floor ring and lift up.”

  Inside were several safety harnesses, two environment suits, and a number of autofit breathing masks.

  “There is no suit that would handle my form,” the Rithian noted. “I shall be all right with the breather and safety line.”

  “That should be all right for all of us,” Kincaid replied. “If it’s a vacuum, the airlock will either refuse to open or be shut again by the pressure here. I doubt if there are any lines for toxic gases in there. Everybody get on a safety harness and hook to the railing here. Then pull up a breather and hold it. Okay, good. Check your masks.”

  Angel had never had one on, but it seemed simple enough to do, and the mask over her nose and mouth fitted itself to the contours of her face and fed oxygen-rich air. The Rithian also hooked up, and the mask contoured even to its snakelike face. Kincaid nodded to the crewman and said, “Open it.”

  Warning bells sounded as the airlock was opened while still in a red condition, but the rounded airlock twisted like a spiral lens and opened onto the nearly kilo
meter-long tunnel that linked the passenger module to the bridge on the main ship.

  Water gushed out in an enormous rush and washed over them, knocking all three of them down. The harnesses, clipped to the railings, held them in place for what seemed like eternity but was actually no more than a minute or two. The water itself was salty and mineral-rich, but it wasn’t the main problem, as it was vented and recaptured by the ship’s systems and slowly went down to a trickle.

  It was so unexpected that Angel had been completely bowled over, and she knew that it had been sufficient to probably cause some bruises.

  “Everybody all right?” Kincaid shouted, picking himself up.

  Only the crewman stood there, looking totally confused. “We are shifting the water out through vents to the main tanks,” he assured them. “Restoring normal operation should happen in a matter of minutes. It is, however, very confusing. This is impossible. It cannot happen.”

  “Your sensor systems were bypassed,” Kincaid told the crewman. “It was probably done outside, while we were in station-keeping. Was any maintenance done on your overall systems?”

  “Just the usual preventive maintenance and refreshing of systems. Nothing major.”

  “But somebody or some maintenance robot had access to the computer memory section or comm interfaces?”

  “Well, that is not unheard of, but any shutdowns or modifications would be logged.”

  “Is there any way to pump this amount of water under pressure into the catwalk from either this module or the main ship’s module?”

  “No. It would have to have been done externally.”

  Angel managed to stand up, then removed her mask and tried to get her bearings. Her eyes hurt from the mineral salts, and her robe felt like a soaking wet blanket.

  She looked around, appalled at the implications. “So where’s the Captain?” she asked them, shaking her head.

  “Where indeed?” echoed Kincaid.

  On the Freighter City of Modar

  “Your sensors were obviously disabled on the catwalk,” Jeremiah Kincaid said to the holographic crewman. “And your view of the bridge is obviously also false, probably a looped recording. Assuming that this is true for the sake of argument, is there any way you can physically determine the actual contents of the bridge void?”

  “I have already gone to work on that,” the crewman replied. “A routine air-cleaning robot was dispatched into the ducting and reports the ducts on the deck level are flooded to the emergency lock stop; the ones on the top are clear, but it is likely the void is predominantly the same fluid as was in the catwalk. That is most unfortunate since the salts and minerals in the water are somewhat caustic and can cause damage.”

  “Can you pump it out?”

  “I could vent it to space, but it would be irrecoverable.”

  “The hell with recovery! It’s obvious that it’s not part of the main system anyway. Probably pumped in during the master refueling. It would do as fuel for the engines just as well as the normal gel. That’s probably why you have such a weight imbalance in the gravity enabled sections. The water is shifting with the engine pulses rather than having a steady ooze as with the gel.”

  “Most certainly a good hypothesis,” the crewman responded. “It will also mean that we will be short on fuel.”

  “I suspect that’s partly the idea. We’ll hold off on going further in that direction until we get the rest of the picture. Vent the water from the bridge and reintroduce the gas atmosphere that should be in there.” He turned to the pair he’d brought with him, who now were simply trying to dry out.

  “You two want to go back? I apologize for bringing you along just to get a dunking, but I couldn’t know what we’d find here and I believed I might have needed extra hands or backups or even witnesses. Now I see that the perpetrators are long gone.”

  “I could use a fluffy towel and a dry cassock, but I’m game to see this through,” Angel told him. “I think I paid the price to see what’s at the end.”

  “I, too, should like to see it through,” the Rithian told him. “I do not like the implications of this, and I would rather have knowledge than allow my imagination to flow as freely as the water.”

  Kincaid nodded, seeming pleased. “All right, then. If there was anybody left in there, I suspect they are even now drowning in a nice nitrogen-oxygen mix. I certainly hope so.”

  “You may go ahead,” the crewman told them. “I will meet you at the other end. I cannot restore things until you can get inside, since I will need to extend this probe to see what is actually there.”

  Kincaid unhooked but did not remove the safety harness. Angel and the Rithian had both already discarded theirs, and neither felt like putting it back on unless they had to. Kincaid seemed to read their thoughts.

  “I doubt if the harness will be necessary. It’s up to you.”

  “You two go on,” Angel told them. “I will catch up to you in a few minutes.”

  Kincaid frowned. “Be careful rushing on the catwalk. You are out of a full gravity field there.”

  “I’ll be careful,” she promised him, and first Kincaid and then the Rithian went through the lock.

  Angel needed a few moments to slip off the cassock, which was all she had on, and roll it up. Then, by standing on it, kneading it with her feet and twisting with her hands, she squeezed an amazing amount of water out. It wasn’t dry when she put it back on, but it wasn’t heavy and sopping wet, either. It was, however, cold.

  There was an odor in the air, of salt and some fairly unpleasant substances that reminded her of spray cleaners or insecticides. That water was foul.

  She walked up to the lock, which opened for her in that curious lenslike fashion and gave green lights. She stepped out onto the catwalk, and the lock closed behind her.

  The catwalk was another world, almost—a metallic grating for a floor, and two thin handrails, one on each side, the walkway not large enough for two of her to walk abreast. It was in fact nothing more than a great transparent tube with its own emanating light around it, and it seemed to go on and on.

  Angel weighed about sixty-three kilos in gravity norm, and was used to slightly more in the heavier gravity of the world where she’d been working, but now she bounced along as if she weighed almost nothing. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as it felt, she realized, but not only was gravity well down in the tube, as Kincaid had warned her, it also varied, sometimes significantly, as you went along. It was disorienting enough that she found herself grasping the handrail and going nice and slow.

  Kincaid certainly had been a godsend in this emergency, she reflected. If he hadn’t been aboard, what might have happened to all of them? Not that they were out of the woods yet, but what had seemed icy, alienlike distance and fearsome hatred had been transformed by circumstances into just the kind of confident authority she and probably most of the other passengers would need.

  … godsend in this emergency…

  This wasn’t an emergency! she realized with a start. Somehow, Kincaid had known, or at least suspected, that something bad was going to happen. That was why he was aboard. And if he’d devoted his entire existence to hunting down and destroying one of the legendary evils of history, then…

  Didn’t that Rithian say the would-be Conqueror of the Universe was a water breather?

  She didn’t catch up with the two, but did have them in sight, tiny figures in the distance whom she made out mostly by the fact that they moved.

  Angel quickly discovered that to walk without getting dizzy and sick along this passage, she had to keep her eyes steadily on that vanishing point ahead. The tube was transparent; in null-space there was a Great Void, a nothingness that the brain interpreted as jet-black because it had no other way to depict it. Otherwise, there was only the ship, bathed in an energy glow that kept it insulated from the Great Void beyond.

  She didn’t think she was going to make it, but eventually she did. Out of breath, disoriented, with some nausea to boot, she fi
nally reached the end and a solid section with a double airlock. She stepped inside the one, heard it close behind her, and felt gravity of almost ship’s normal return. When the aft lock was closed, the forward one opened, and she walked into one huge wretched-looking mess.

  There was the smell of electricity in the air, and a lot of the instrumentation on the big semicircular control panel was blinking red or simply shorted out. The whole place seemed covered with rusty reds and bleach-white and granular yellow scum, the undoubted residue of what was in the water. A computer pad, some papers, and a few customized real printed books—rare in this day and age, but common, she knew, among starship captains—were waterlogged, twisted, and ruined.

  The whole place smelled like it had just been fumigated and not properly aired.

  “Don’t mind the smell!” Kincaid called to her from a slightly elevated platform in the rear of the bridge. “I’m afraid it’ll get worse before it gets better, but the computer probe assures me that it won’t really damage any of us, just annoy the hell out of our lungs.”

  She saw the big, padded command chair in front of the bridge, definitely the seat of authority, its high back blocking the view of anyone who might occupy it. It had controls and circuitry in the arms, and a set of modules on arms that could be brought in front or to one side. A series of monitors, six of them, were directly in front, although only a couple were working. She had the sudden, uneasy feeling that somebody was in that chair. Without saying a word, she walked toward it, slowly, almost as if expecting some monster to leap out from it at her throat, and for some reason she couldn’t explain, she began reciting the prayer of comfort to the Blessed Virgin over and over again. Still, she was drawn to the command chair.