Death of a Starship (21 page)

A stubby, fat-tailed boat shot out
of Shorty’s Surprise. It spun twice, trailing bright fire in the
glittering fog, then thrusters puffed as the boat oriented itself
and made a course clear of the whirling rockballs, the multiple
parked ships and the general chaos of localspace here.

“
Good-bye, Ser Albrecht,” he
whispered into the collapsed bag of his disposable helmet. “We will
meet soon.” With that, the elevator fell into a hole in the
rockball beneath his feet.

Time to find a way
out.
Jenny’s Little Pearl
awaited.

‡

The rockball was crazy-crowded,
interior laid out in marked contrast to the purposeful architecture
of the core. It was another country, so to speak, where people
moved in groups and gangs, and air seemed to be sold by the minute
or the day. There was gravity here, too much of it frankly, but the
corridors twisted and coiled in defiance. They were lined with
ropes and cables and ladders and cargo nets, a sort of infinite
gymnasium inhabited by the hungry and the hopeless.

As oddly patched and put together
as the core had been, Shorty’s balls were dark and dangerous, and
filled with dark, dangerous people. No wonder they’d grown them big
back in the core.

Golliwog struggled through the
heavier gravity with the life bubbles slung over his left shoulder,
connecting cable wrapped once around his left arm. He let the
pistol show in his right hand. Everything else was stuffed in the
utility bag over his right shoulder.

He was conscious of the
minutes remaining. Minutes ‘til the life ran out of canned air and
heat. Minutes ‘til his disposable suit gave up. Minutes that
Albrecht was almost certainly using to get away. Golliwog didn’t
care about the mythical
Enver
Hoxha
. He didn’t care about
Jenny D
. He just wanted
out.

Stay here, whispered the rebel
voice in his head.

Golliwog shrugged it off and worked
his way toward the lighter gravity of the coreward hemisphere.
Stepping out of a hatch on the spinward side would simply cause him
to repeat Albrecht’s departure from the core, except without the
benefit of a spaceship wrapped around his body. Stepping out on the
coreward side would allow him to control his jumping off
point.

He held something between a
hope and a prayer that he could recognize and make his way
to
Jenny’s Little Pearl
in the few minutes that remained to him and his
charges by the time he got back into vacuum. It struck Golliwog
that his unknown benefactors had already accomplished their aims.
He was out of the core, as were Yee and the angel, and Albrecht was
gone, too. There was no guarantee they’d given him enough air,
tools and supplies to make his own climb.

Stop now, said that voice, and live
among these hard men a while. You’ll find a place, they’ll welcome
your talents once they stop trying to kill you. Yee and the angel
are done, and who is Albrecht to you? What are those missing ships
to you?

The priest. The priest who had
called him “son” would expect more. Golliwog owed the priest
nothing, either, but...he had to start somewhere. He knew he wasn’t
going back, but he could do his job before he left. He would be
more than a piece of equipment, more than a weapon, whatever law
and regs said about biones.

Whether the Navy would recognize
his departure was another issue entirely, but he would blow that
airlock when he came to it.

And here was one final upward
climb, a shoal of starving-thin boys scattering at a spray of
needles from Golliwog’s pistol. He tucked the weapon into the
lashed fold of his left arm and began the last one-handed ascent.
Even here, in two thirds gravity, it was a strain. Had he been an
ordinary human, Golliwog would already have failed.

‡

The top of the ladder was indeed an
airlock, some strange helical design ripped from a long-vanished
ship and welded into place here. Like all the other hatches inside
the rockball, it opened at the press of a button. Whatever security
they had here certainly wasn’t enforced by architecture or
facilities design.

This lock had a long, tubular
chamber. Had it once fired projectiles, he wondered? Ignoring the
burning in his chest, Golliwog hauled the life bubbles to the top
as the air pumped out, then opened the last hatch.

The view above was wrenching.
Shorty’s core was absolutely still two hundred meters above his
head, filling the central arc of his personal sky. The other two
balls were visible beyond it. Various ships and hulks kept some
kind of position with respect to the primary. The rest of the world
rotated, the bright ribbon of the Necklace moving
visibly.

Fourteen minutes, eleven point four
seconds since he’d activated the angel’s life bubble. Yee was seven
seconds behind. Well within the margin of error of the crude
systems.

When they’d parked the dark
boat, Golliwog and Yee had spotted
Jenny’s
Little Pearl
tucked against some old mass
hauler.
That
hulk
wasn’t hard to find now, either. It was the biggest thing in
localspace after Shorty’s balls and the core of the Surprise
itself. It was between his current and the next rockball, more or
less.

He tried to calculate the jumping
off vector and velocity he’d require to make the leap, realized he
simply didn’t know his own mass with enough precision. Not when the
mass included Yee and the angel hanging from his body. And this
damned suit had no thrusters at all. Another flaw to go with its
five minutes of air.

The first time Golliwog had ever
tried to play catch, as a juvenile, he’d nearly had a seizure
calculating intercepts and probability curves. Humans, true humans,
didn’t calculate trajectories. They just leapt and
trusted.

He was good now, too. Better than
any human, even one as overtrained as Dr. Yee. But this was a time
to leap and trust, himself, Chor Episcopos Menard’s God, whatever
fate there was that watched over him.

“
And so I jump,” said Golliwog. He
closed his eyes and kicked off, the most human act he had ever
committed.

‡

Golliwog opened his eyes again. He
was at least making headway toward the mass hauler. He was also
falling away, in a natural reaction to the angular momentum
imparted him by Shorty’s ball. Nano glittered around him as the
defensive cloud reacted to his passage. It had trapped Golliwog
once before, immobilizing him to be hauled into the core after his
fight with the angel.

He tried his carrier signal again.
He wanted to modulate the nano formations, get them to accumulate
on his rimward side, millions of tiny thrusters each exercising a
few millimeter/milligrams of thrust to correct his arc toward the
mass hauler.

Once more the fog rippled at his
mental touch, but he didn’t see the Naval countersigns. It was
hacked, or homebrewed, he already knew that, but the fact that it
reacted to him meant the underlying tech was similar.

It didn’t matter. His course
was moving further and further away from the target. In about
thirty-five seconds he would pass a point of no return, where there
wasn’t any reasonable correction to bring him back to the mass
hauler and to
Jenny’s Little
Pearl
.

What was left to him?

What was left to any
human
in extremis
?

“
God,” Golliwog said, his voice
muffled inside his baggie helmet. “You are not for me, and I am not
Your creation. But if your priest Menard saw something of worth in
me, perhaps You do too.”

Nothing happened. He became angry
at the thought of dying, of wasting himself out hear.

“
Move, damn it!” he shouted at the
nano. He could see the point of no return on his trajectory fast
approaching. “Move!”

Inspiration struck. Golliwog
grabbed the pistol from where it was tucked inside his dead left
arm. He aimed it opposite his desired line of travel, into the axis
of thrust he wanted from the nano. It might react, it might trap
him, shred him, shock him, do nothing.

“
Hey God! Are you listening?”
Twenty-four seconds from the point of no return, Golliwog pulled
the trigger.

‡

Menard: Halfsummer Solar Space,
The Necklace, In transit

It was a while before the inside of
Dillon’s rock hopper stopped smelling like rank, dank fear. Menard
had been inside prisons more pleasant than this. To his right,
Albrecht rubbed his left wrist obsessively and muttered. All he
could see of Dillon was a three-quarter rear profile of the pilot’s
crash couch, and most of Dillon’s left arm.

At least gravity was in the floor
now, though something hummed with an ozone crackle that fought the
fear-stink and promised extended future microgravity. And the view
was amazing. Menard gave thanks to God that the Creator had not
seen fit to endow His priest with agoraphobia. Instead, he saw all
the diamonds of The Necklace as if they had been arrayed for his
delight.

“
We just want to get rid of it,
you know,” Dillon said into the long silence which had stretched
since launch. “Well, most of us,” he added after another thoughtful
pause.

“
I just wanted out of here,”
Albrecht answered. “Now I’m the target of multiple manhunts.
But...” He stopped, thinking of the people crowded within Shorty’s
Surprise. “You belters. There’s a world and more here, isn’t
there?”

“
The lack of one, more like it,”
Dillon muttered, but Menard could hear the humor in his voice,
matching the tension in Albrecht’s tone.

“
I never thought
to found anything worthwhile in this damned system,” Albrecht said
quietly. “Speaking of Halfsummer, where’s
Novy Petrograd
,
anyway?”

“
Still hanging
around Shorty’s, watching
Jenny’s Little
Pearl
.”

“
I don’t suppose your geniuses
wiped that ephemeridian data when they pulled it out.”

“
No.” Dillon’s tone suggested
further questioning was unwise – that was obvious to Menard. He cut
Albrecht off even as the spacer opened his mouth for more. “What
are you two talking about?”

“
Give me thirty minutes, Chor
Episcopos, and I’ll show you.”

“
We’re not nearly that close,”
muttered Albrecht.

“
You want to drive?”

“
No.”

“
Then shut up.”

“
Gentlemen,” Menard said slowly in
his best staff meeting voice. “We have our lives, and freedom of
movement. Whatever, ah, coup, was under way back there did not stop
us from making our exit in good order.”

“
The Black Flag,” said Dillon.
“Our dark side. This may be putting them over the top.”

The top of what, Menard
wondered, but he held his counsel.
St.
Gaatha
would be on the scene soon enough,
and Lieutenant McNally would take a keen interest in learning his
whereabouts. Unless whoever was behind Captain Yee from Naval
Oversight showed up with a bigger ship, of course. He wondered what
had become of her and that wretched bione in the company of the
angel. “Do you know the fate of my prisoners?”

“
Wrong people got ‘em,” Dillon
snapped. “Could be free, could be dead.”

“
Ah.” Menard bowed his head and
began to pray for the souls of the probably departed.

‡

A while later Dillon rolled the
rock hopper. The sky precessed in front of the view ports until
they were facing at a low, reverse angle to their line of travel.
“Watch,” said Dillon, and tapped a code sequence into one of his
panels.

Out there in the Deep Dark, a
sequence of blue lights lit up, one after another, a ripple effect
that went on for about ten seconds.

It seemed big, and it was blesséd
invisible without the lights. There was no way to achieve a sense
of scale out here, though.

“
What is it?” asked
Menard.

“
Refitting yard,” Albrecht said
sourly.

“
A yard? For tugs, or ice crackers
or some such?”

Albrecht again: “Yes.
Idiots.
Now show him the
rest of it, Dillon.”

Dillon tapped another sequence.
This time, the lights rippled almost forty seconds. The perspective
was much deeper.

“
That, Your Reverence,” said
Albrecht, “is about four kilometers of refitting
frames.”

“
Four kilometers?” Menard was
shocked. “And no one ever noticed it?”

“
Even the inspectors only come
here in our ships,” Dillon said. “They use our instruments. No one
ever looks out the window in space. Nothing to see.”

That made a certain kind of sense.
“Unless you’re a rock jockey.”

“
Right.”

Four kilometers! Menard tried
to work those dimensions out in terms he was familiar with. The
Patriarch’s personal transport,
Sts. Kyril
and Methodius
, had a keel about nine
hundred meters long. He’d been told it was the largest starship in
the Empire, even bigger than the Emperor’s flagship. “So why is it
that large? This is your big fish, right, Ser
Albrecht?”