“Caution? Research? Reading and quiet contemplation? Bruce, what have you been drinking?”
“Professional–level recklessness requires a surprising amount of planning and forethought,” he said, wagging his finger at her. “Hours of work for every pratfall. I just make it look easy.”
§
A few hours later Bruce lurched over to the desk in the corner of his apartment, and sat down heavily. “Who you at, M. Melson?” he asked the desk. Not receiving a reply, he smacked a meaty paw on the display, beginning his investigation.
The name M. Melson itself was unusual. Bruce had never seen a property record registered using an initial before. After pounding his fists on the desk display for awhile, then slightly softer with his slightly smaller fingers, he was able to bring up the census database, where he found out the second unusual thing about the name: it didn’t exist. Thanks to the ancient custom still practiced on the Argos of a child taking one of their parents’ names, there was a strict upper limit of surnames on board. And Melson wasn’t one of them.
Bruce got up from his chair and looped his way across the living room to the liquor cabinet, where he picked out a bottle of Berry. Unscrewing it with his teeth, he returned to the desk and sat down. The property transfer process was pretty straightforward: two parties came to an agreement, transferred whatever funds or sexual favors they had agreed on, co–signed an electronic form, and sent it all to the central records department. The signatures were the tricky bit; the transaction system had a variety of biometric and anti–coercion scanners in place that made those hard to forge. Which meant that whoever this M. Melson was, he had somehow fooled the signature system to accept his false identity. Or, that there actually was an M. Melson who later deleted himself from the census. Neither of these possibilities seemed very likely, but they did both seem interesting.
Curious, he checked the property transfer database itself, something he had access to thanks to a highly successful bit of blackmail he had once pulled off. The studio had apparently been sold to Maurice Melson by a Charlotte Redelso nine years earlier. No indication why the name was truncated in the public listings, but at least he had another clue to work with. Further back into the studio’s history, it had been in the Redelso family for sixty years.
He turned his attention back to M–for–Maurice Melson. Despite the close confines of the Argos, its citizens still had a reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to their personal records. The security forces could do detailed traces, background checks, and off–duty stalking, but Bruce was limited to searches of publicly visible news sites and records. Which turned up absolutely nothing when queried for “Maurice Melson.” “Melson” returned substantially more results, but nothing from the past thirty years; it was a dead name. With breeding sharply limited by government edict, the number of named descendants was similarly restricted, and thanks to disease and accidental deaths, a few family names inevitably died off. A bit more searching showed that the last living Melson was a Greg Melson, who died in a well–wall climbing accident thirty years earlier. News feeds at the time all made note of the fact that Greg had no children, and that — notwithstanding the fact that ‘we were all cousins’ — the Melson family’s journey on board the Argos had come to a close.
So where did Maurice come from? And how did he go from not being a person to being a person who bought properties and booby–trapped them? Bruce’s bladder interrupted his investigation, and after tending to it, he decided he wasn’t likely to make further progress on the problem until he rampaged through the studio itself. And now the hour was too late, and the drink too heavy in him, for proper rampaging. But he had other things to do anyway. He checked the time. Probably safe now.
On his terminal, he opened the control panel to remotely monitor a maintenance robot. Over the past week he had slowly maneuvered it across the ship until it reached the roof of Curts’ garden well apartment. It was painstaking, tedious work of the sort he would normally shun were it not in support of such a good cause. Curts, his boss, was an enormous wiener, and fully worth the time and effort Bruce dedicated to aggravating him.
He maneuvered the robot out of its hiding spot and over the edge of the building to a perch directly above Curts’ bedroom window. When it pressed its manipulator against the windowpane, Bruce triggered a subroutine that rapidly vibrated it against the windowpane, creating a makeshift but surprisingly effective speaker playing a loop of a low, almost sub–vocal voice, slowly whispering to Curts as he slept, “Curts. Currrrrrrts. I am Curts. I love Curts. I love you. I love me. Love. Love. LOOOOOVE. Now peeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Peeeeeeeeeeeeee. PEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.”
Satisfied, Bruce activated a second subroutine that instructed the robot to return to its hiding spot if it heard any disturbance from within the room. He shut off his terminal and left the robot to its work. If everything went according to plan, Curts would wake up feeling ashamed and damp, and need a couple of personal days to straighten himself out. Rolling into bed himself, Bruce conceded there was at least some possibility Curts would react by stepping off a light tower instead. “I’d feel bad if that happened,” Bruce said aloud, turning off the lights. “Though I’d probably feel worse if I knew that I hadn’t tried.”
§
Stein opened the double–wide doors and stepped through into the reactor room. “And this is the bow auxiliary power room,” she announced to the group of kids trailing behind her. A couple of technicians looked up at the crowd of tiny wriggling projectiles that two beleaguered teachers struggled to ride herd on.
The room was large for this part of the ship, the curvature of the floor readily visible. Only a few decks away from the core, the pseudo gravity was about a tenth of normal. The room was dominated by the reactor, or more precisely, the reactor shielding, a large cylinder oriented parallel to the ship’s axis, half embedded in the floor. On the far side of the space, a figure in a naval uniform jumped up and landed on top of the engine shielding with practiced grace. Stein nodded to Max, the bow auxiliary engineer.
“This is what fires the rockets?” one of the kids asked.
“Not quite,” Max replied with practiced patience. Aside from having to explain that to every school group that went through here, Max was used to fielding this question from grown–ups as well. Most of the adults on board the Argos didn’t know where their heat and electricity came from. “This engine powers the electrical and heating systems for the bulk of the ship. The propulsion engine is in the aft.” He gestured to the far end of the room. “But otherwise, the reactors are basically identical. Does anyone here know what antimatter is?” Max launched into his spiel, leading the group deeper into the room.
Stein held back at the door, eager for the break. Not for the first time, she wondered about the intent of these field trips. The kids didn’t want to see any of this, far preferring the simple joys of mucking around in low–gravity. The cooling plant, network relay, and heat recyclers had similarly held little interest for them. She didn’t blame them — most of this stuff wasn’t that exciting, and she didn’t recall enjoying it that much when she was a child. But the teachers felt it important, and every few months or so another group of children would crawl all over the vital organs of the ship and grow immediately bored of them.
One of the children held back from the group, looking at his terminal with a bored expression. He had been asking lots of questions earlier in the tour, but appeared to have lost interest. This was a seventh year class, which would make him about eleven. Stein thought his name was Bert, based on some exasperated shushing from one of the teachers.
“You’re going to miss learning how antimatter reactors work,” Stein said, deciding to try her luck with the child’s name. “Bert, was it?”
Bert didn’t correct her. “I already know how they work,” he said, with the air of a practiced know–it–all. “Deuterium molecules go into anti–deuterium molecules and it goes BANG and then we get energy.”
“Pretty good,”
Stein said. “You’ve read all about that in school?”
“Laugh!” Bert replied, saying the word instead of laughing. “They don’t teach us any of that stuff in seventh year. I had to teach myself all about it. Like the 8–D magnets they use to control it.”
Stein’s eyes widened. “You’re a smart kid.”
“Obviously. Did you know that it takes a hundred times more energy to make antimatter than we can get out of it?”
Stein nodded. “I think I knew that, yes.”
“That’s why we can’t make any more of it,” Bert said. He bounced up and down. “But we can make more matter!”
“I don’t know if that’s right.”
“Well, we can’t ‘make it,’ make it. But we didn’t bring enough of it. That’s what the terminal says. We were burning it wrong. So, we’ve had to start mixing it with ground rock! Isn’t that crazy?”
“That is crazy.” It sounded familiar though, the sort of factoid she’d heard before in school, but evidently not something that had stuck.
“Do you know where they get the rock from?”
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Max.”
“Okay! Can he show us the rockets?” Bert sniffed. “’Cause this is all boring.” He glared at the reactor, which was the beating heart of the ship.
“There’s no tours of the aft engines any more, Bert. They’re busy working on them — getting them back into shape.” Stein held up her hands in a what–can–you–do gesture.
“For the Big Push,” Bert said.
“That’s right.” The Big Push was the braking sequence the Argos would have to make if it didn’t want to smoke into its new home at several thousand kilometers per second. It was supposed to have begun the previous day, but thanks to a navigational error and massive course correction a hundred and seventy years previous, the schedule had been pushed back. “That’s pretty advanced stuff for a kid your age.”
“I think it’s neat is all.”
Stein smiled. “It is neat. I can see why you’d want to see what the drives look like.” Bert nodded earnestly, as though he hoped that Stein, impressed with his moxie, would magically pull some strings and get him an all–access pass to the ship. Stein continued, “But, boring as it is, this guy here is what’s kept us alive for the last couple hundred years.”
“Laugh,” Burt said. “You sound like my dad.”
Stein felt enormous sympathy for Bert’s dad, and all the other adults in his life. As the tour group made its way back from the far end of the engine room, she exchanged a glance with one of the teachers, who let out a short bark of a laugh after recognizing the look on Stein’s face.
Bert crossed the room to bother the naval technicians who had moved off to the side when the kids arrived. A twisted black box lay at their feet, some component of the reactor that Stein couldn’t readily identify. That wasn’t surprising — she was well out of her element in this room. She guessed they were in the middle of a repair when the tour group interrupted them.
She wouldn’t normally have chaperoned one of these, but she was short staffed again that day — Gabelman still hadn’t shown up for work. Bruce was great with stuff like this, but that morning the big man had strongly hinted that he’d found out something interesting about M. Melson and was going to dig up more that day. With Bruce, this ‘digging’ process could entail almost anything, and although Stein knew enough not to ask any questions, she couldn’t not worry about it. Visions of Bruce putting small children in armlocks danced in her head. Best to leave him to his own devices when he was in such a mood, as far away from the distressing 11–year–olds as possible.
§
It was the best place on the ship to see why the garden well had been so named, a floor–to–ceiling window offering a panoramic view of the entire well. Although any observer in the well could see it was a massive hollow cylinder, only here at the end, four stories above the surface, was it possible to look down the entire length of the ship. The illusion of looking down a well was dizzyingly strong.
The rest of the office was well appointed. A massive desk sat in the center of the room, lightly scuffed, but very precisely curved to match the curve in the floor. The carpet on the floor was aggressively purple, plush on the sides, worn in the middle. In truth, everything in the room was worn, maybe a bit less so than other parts of the ship, but still noticeable. That was a never–ending source of annoyance to the room’s current resident, who wanted, even needed everything in this room to impress.
Nothing here impressed the captain, and Mayor Eric Kinsella hated him for it. Every other person on the Argos who held any real power owed their position to Kinsella in some way, whether they knew it or not. Nominally, Captain Helot did, as well. The ship’s constitution was very clear about the relative authority between the civilian government and the commander of the vessel itself. But there was a certain lack of deference in Helot’s behavior that suggested to Kinsella that his counterpart thought otherwise.
“Diagnostics on all the rotational thrusters have been completed. We should have eighty–five percent of them working before deceleration begins,” Helot read without looking up from the terminal in his hand.
Helot had been made Captain almost twenty years earlier by one of Kinsella’s predecessors. Kinsella didn’t know the whole story, but got the impression that Helot had been given the job ahead of older and more experienced personnel as part of some multi–layered political stratagem being played by the mayor at the time. He couldn’t recall if the stratagem worked or not, and indeed it didn’t really matter — that mayor was long gone.
The next mayor had chosen to leave Helot in place, seeing no need to rock the boat as it were. A mistake as far as Kinsella was concerned. By being made Captain at such a young age, Helot had spent a third of his life in office, plenty of time to become a familiar and comfortable presence to the ship’s citizens. This left Kinsella handcuffed by a captain who was — though no one would come out and say it — significantly more popular than he was.
Bored, Kinsella drummed his fingers on his desk. Realizing he was being rude, he stopped, then just as quickly wished he hadn’t. He didn’t have to care if he was rude. He was tired of dealing with Helot. He smiled involuntarily, then caught himself when he realized he never smiled during cabinet briefings. Concentrating, he focused his energies on not fidgeting with the terminal sitting on his desk, recently delivered to him by Thorias, the security chief.
Helot had given every appearance of a man dedicated to his career. His list of dependents was short: no wife, no children, one ship. In a society where the privilege of breeding was a precious commodity, the lack of a family marked him as unusual. Kinsella tried to hide a smile. How would people react if they knew their captain’s brave solitude wasn’t a reflection of his commitment to public service? Just a side effect of a secret and dark perversion? The information on the terminal in front of him was toe–curlingly detailed.
Kinsella allowed himself a thin smile as the captain continued to drone through his briefing. Yes, Helot was going to be out of his hair soon. And Kinsella had big plans for his going away party.
§
One day, this will all be yours. Bruce strolled down one of the leafy tree–lined streets in the garden well, looking up at the low–rise apartment buildings around him. Gonna move on up. Get me some windows. Live like a pope.
While Stein burgled merely for her own amusement, Bruce had actual goals in mind when he worked the nights. Although many dwellings below decks did have windows, when they fronted out to a hallway, this wasn’t a lot to get excited about. Not like the expensive and hard–to–come–by windows in the garden well, with their breezes and laughter and classy women leaning out of them. It was a nice goal, stealing for windows. It certainly felt more romantic than stealing for money, which is what it looked like he was doing most of the time.
Bruce spotted the address, 2835 Begonia, and walked in the front door. Taking the stairs up to the third floor
he examined the interior halls thoughtfully. Dust and grime, but much, much less than in his place. Ms. Redelso had done quite well for herself since selling the old family studio in the aft. Finding the right apartment, Bruce rang the buzzer and waited.
He had to hurry, window–wise. There was no point getting a window after the ship had stopped and they were all living in caves or whatever. Then everyone would have windows. They would be worthless. Worse than worthless — they would be liabilities. Letting in cold and dirt and leopards. He had no use for those windows.
The door opened, revealing a modestly attractive middle–aged woman. Bruce recognized her from his research: she was the semi–famous, artistically–middling painter, Charlotte Redelso.
“Maintenance,” Bruce said, by way of introduction. “You have a problem with your heat?”
Confused, Charlotte shook her head. “No. I don’t think so.” She looked behind her. “Nope, we never have problems here.”
Of course not, woman, you live in a tropical paradise. “Hmmmmmmmm,” Bruce said, checking his terminal. “Looks like we’ve got a problem, then. Do you mind if I come in and take a look?”
“Well, actually…”
“Thanks,” Bruce said, “my boss will kill me if this doesn’t get looked at. I’m not kidding. She has these knives, and is just constantly looking for an excuse to use them. It’s a real bad scene. Thank you for your understanding.” As predicted, this barrage of information overwhelmed Redelso, who retreated inside the apartment, wide–eyed.
Bruce followed her inside, putting his terminal carefully into his webbing. At the center of the room, he stopped and looked around slowly, turning a complete circle. Spotting the membrane above the door he had just entered with a look of surprise, he reached up and prodded it with a temperature probe. After examining the probe with the most thoughtful expression he could muster, he made a noise that he hoped sounded like something a man who was solving a complicated problem would make. He turned again, passing a quick smile at Redelso as he did so. “Looks okay so far.” He moved across the apartment to one of the two — two! — windows and peered outside.
Severance Page 5
