Death of a Starship (11 page)

I hope this letter finds you in
health.

–
The Priest Enxo Danel,
Amanuensis to His Grace the Bishop of Halfsummer

‡

Saints and
martyrs
, thought Menard. A ship had finally
come back from the dead. Or at least a ship’s boat. Maybe Sister
Pelias’ K-M analyses were paying off. It was certainly an anomalous
event, whatever the likelihood that there was to be xenic influence
somewhere at the heart of it.

Menard shivered. And then
there was the angel’s interest in
Jenny’s
Diamond Bright
. If “interest” was the
appropriate term for the sort of fatal intensity usually associated
with being an angel’s focus of attention.

He couldn’t allow that boat to be
overhauled and destroyed. “Currently in the process of being
deployed” was vague but ominous. Menard flipped the dataslate to
ship’s comm and buzzed McNally.

“
I’ll be right in there, Chor
Episcopos.” The lieutenant was as good as his word, making it to
the ward room a minute or so later. He looked crisp but slightly
hurried as he stepped up to Menard’s station chair and visibly
suppressed a salute. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“
Do we have any authority here in
the Halfsummer system, Ken?”

McNally’s look became a stare.
“Chor Episcopos?”

Menard sighed. “Do we have any
authority here? Practical authority, to intervene in an impending
military action by the locals?”

“
Uh...no. Strictly speaking, no.
Sir.”

That wasn’t the first such
opening Menard had ever heard in an official conversation. He
caught the toss. “And
not
so strictly speaking?”

“
Well...
St. Gaatha
’s a fast courier. Not a warship as such. But all vessels of
the Church Militant are armed, sir. For the greater glory and to be
of full service to the Patriarch. According to our files, the only
armed vessel stationed here is a pre-Imperial light cruiser with a
reserve crew. She outguns us by about a hundred gigawatt/seconds of
nominal firepower, but our weapon systems have a century’s worth of
engineering improvements, and much better range.”

“
So that’s authority through
superior firepower.”

“
Yes, sir. Unfortunately we’re
still about fifty transit hours from being in effective reach of
any action occurring in Halfsummer planetary space. We do of course
have the moral authority of the Church, especially with Your
Reverence’s presence here.” McNally pitched his voice down. “I
assume the Bishop of Halfsummer would be in accordance with any
actions we might take within his diocese, of course.”

“
Of course,” murmured Menard,
fascinated. McNally had all the makings of a politician. He’d
already realized that the lieutenant was more than just another
Church Militant missilehead, but even so, it was a new side to the
man’s character.

McNally held up two fingers.
“Authority through force, authority through moral suasion.” He
lifted a third. “We also have authority through
misdirection.”

“
Excuse me?”

“
We’re not a
civilian ship. We don’t dump our files out to information auction
when we hit the system. Some of them, yes. But not en masse. So you
can send a message to the Imperial Resident or the Naval Reserve
commander asserting authority over the fugitive ship. No one will
be able to contradict you, since
St.
Gaatha
’s systems have the most current
information in Halfsummer space. Only we know the truth. I assume
this regards the
Jenny’s Little
Pearl
, yes?”

“
Yes...” Menard was still
processing the concept of authority through
misdirection.

“
Excellent. Tell them you’ve got
an Edict of Attainder against the vessel and its crew. The Bishop
can manage the local arguments if you’re using the authority of the
Prime See.”

“
That would absolutely constitute
bearing false witness,” said Menard in a faint voice.

“
Not if you swear
one out. This is a Church courier, sir. We have a Patriarchal Seal
in our ship’s locker. For just such emergencies. There’s a
procedure in Church Militant regulations for the Hierarch on the
scene to swear out an Edict by proxy. That would be you, sir. As
long as the Bishop endorses it, the Edict will be valid here in
system. If there’s a challenge, the canon lawyers can argue about
it later back at the Prime See. You might wind up in Ecclesiastical
Court someday, but meanwhile, you’ve asserted legitimate authority
in pursuit of the mission assigned you by the Patriarch.
Which
St. Gaatha
can back with force of arms, sir.”

“
You’re a dangerous man,
Lieutenant McNally,” Menard said after some thought. He needed that
boat. He needed that pilot. “I predict you’ll go far.”

McNally bowed his head. “Perhaps,
sir. I have been counseled in the past on my need for
humility.”

“
Park the humility ‘til we’re done
pushing around the locals, Ken.”

“
In that case, sir, you might want
to commence your misdirection with an immediate transmission. We’re
still over ninety light-minutes from Halfsummer planetary. You’ll
want your Edict there as soon as possible. I can assist you with
the Seal and other formalities after the fact.”

“
Bless you, my son,” said
Menard.

“
Thank you, Chor Episcopos. I live
to serve.”

“
As do we all.”

‡

Albrecht: Halfsummer Orbital
Space

“Get off my ass!” Albrecht
screamed. It wouldn’t do much good, but it made him feel better.
The main screen plotted the merciless hours of his
demise.

He’d spent the better part of two
days in a hyperbolic orbit, avoiding defense satellite footprints,
bolting down the various bits of equipment which had broken loose
during his departure from beneath the soil of Gryphon Landing, and
reprogramming the boat’s systems to respond to him. There had been
a variety of threats and entreaties via comm, both of which
Albrecht had ignored in equal measure. The lightly armed orbit
hoppers which provided screen defenses to Halfsummer Station didn’t
have the range or speed to catch a ship’s boat powered for
system-wide operations.

All he had to do was avoid
them.

But now the locals had scraped up a
God-damned Naval Reserve light cruiser so old it probably burned
fossil fuel. The beast had lurched into action from Halfsummer
Station about forty minutes previously, presumably after shaking
off a few tons of rust.

Given that his boat’s entire
armament consisted of a single two gigawatt/second meteor popgun
and an empty weapons locker behind the bridge, it didn’t matter how
crotchety that light cruiser was. Once she found a solid vector on
him and put on some thrust, he was done for. The probability curves
that
Pearl
’s
systems were calculating had a progressively unpleasant
trend.

He should have gotten
underway a day ago. But there’d been the shorts in the gravimetric
system, which really hadn’t been designed for immersion in brackish
water. He wasn’t willing to undergo full acceleration with dodgy
inertial compensation in place. And the water tanks were having all
kinds of weird valve problems, which affected their utility as heat
sink, radiation shielding and mass distribution
compensators.
Jenny’s Little Pearl
must have sucked a bunch of crud through some
autocycling intake while he was wallowing around in the swamps
prior to take off. At some point he was going to have to purge the
filters and strip the valves. As it was, the whole boat stunk of
moss and mud.

And now the Imperial Resident was
throwing the local Naval Reserve after him. How pissed could these
people be?

The comm squawked, then
issued the shriek that meant a military priority signal.
“
Jenny’s Little Pearl
, this is Lieutenant Svetlana Bourne, commanding officer of
the INRS
Novy Petrograd
. Please acknowledge our hail.”

He flicked a control on the
main panel. “Bugger off,
Petrograd
.”

There was about six seconds of
lightspeed lag. “It’s Micah Albrecht, isn’t it? Look here, I’ve got
a shoot-to-kill from dirtside. You don’t want that, do
you?”

Albrecht set himself a course
toward The Necklace, what the locals called their asteroid belt. It
was faintly visible at night from the surface of Halfsummer, a
silver thread across part of the sky, and as a destination set his
pursuers on a stern chase. May as well not make Bourne’s job any
easier. “What do you think?”

Another lag, long enough for him to
reflect on the value of being a smartass to the person who would be
soon holding a gun to his head. Then: “Well, neither do I. Certain
fire control officers on my ship notwithstanding.”

“
Lieutenant, what
the hell did I do? Launch without clearance isn’t a capital
offense, and I know I didn’t kill anyone.” The dirtside newsfeeds
had been clear enough about that, though there were some irritated
angry boat owners and dockside businesspeople down there. “I can
make a reasonable claim for this boat being salvage.
I
certainly didn’t steal
it from its rightful owners. Why the temper
tantrum?”

He rechecked his course, waiting
for her reply, then began to consider the job of stripping the
filters and valves from the tankage.

“
My opinion? You got the wrong
people arrested. Some of them have powerful friends.”

That
was true enough. There were a lot of people in custody due to
his little waterfront adventures, and some of them were quite angry
about it. He’d apparently broken open a local cell of the Black
Flag while making good his escape. There were some surprising names
on that list of anarchist revolutionaries, sending hard ripples
through the local politics of Gryphon Landing.

“
But my opinion doesn’t matter,”
Bourne continued. “My orders do. And my orders require me to
intercept you and your ship, and bring you both into custody. With
a shoot-to-kill instruction if you do not render full
cooperation.”

“
Come and get
me,” said Albrecht. He killed the priority comm job with an
engineering override, and went to find the filters. With the course
set,
Pearl
could
fly herself in her last few hours of life. The least he could do
was keep her in proper shape.

‡

He worked in the cross-passage that
connected the port and starboard passages immediately forward of
engineering. The main tankage lines ran right above that passage,
managing mass and volume distribution between the primary tanks in
the boat’s flanks and the secondary storage in the dorsal and
ventral hull sections. Albrecht had set grippers on the filter
access panel, which was unaccountably placed higher than his head
at an acute angle to the deckplane and the relevant gravimetric
field. Even low priority systems required maintenance, a little
fact which seemed to consistently escape the attention of low-bid
naval architects and shipyards across the empire.

That meant when Albrecht backed the
last of the torque screws off, it was going to want to fall, pretty
much on his head. Maybe the designers had intended zero gee
maintenance for this system, but he needed his burn speed enough
that he didn’t want to shut the gravimetrics back down.

The power driver took the six
torque screws out one by one. With each screw the panel settled a
little, releasing more of that mud smell. Whatever goop the boat
had sucked in had, naturally enough, gone to the
filters.

The panel groaned as the last screw
came out. Albrecht flipped the switch on the lower grippers, which
should have caused the panel to swing forward, hinging on the upper
set.

Instead it burst loose as something
large, wet and furious dropped on him, amid a sheet of warm,
stinking water.

Albrecht slammed down on his back.
Jaws wide as his shoulders snapped in front of his face as
something massing at least a hundred kilos bounced on his chest. He
stabbed with the torque driver. It squealed, bit his left wrist,
butted him in the groin, then scuttled through the open hatch into
the port passage.

“
Christ on a mass converter!”
Albrecht shouted at the overhead. “What the hell was
that?”

He was afraid he knew, though. It
was two meters at least, maybe three, and heavier than he was, with
a mouth full of familiar horror. He’d seen his last newt hanging
from the ceiling in the fat man’s bar. Now he’d seen his next,
still alive and biting.

Albrecht caught his breath. “Boat,
secure all hatches,” he said, gripping his wrist with his right
hand to control the bleeding.

“
Secured,”
said
Pearl
.