Linesman (7 page)

But it could get Alliance representatives together for some other reason. Like to agree on a preemptive strike against Gate Union.

Rossi savored another mouthful of wine and tried not to think of Lyan's curves. “We are talking Crown Princess Michelle Lady Lyan here?” There were three Lady Lyans, not to mention two Lord Lyans, and all of them had Michel in their name. Only the Lancastrians were stupid enough to name their children so similarly.

“The dangerous one, yes.”

They were all dangerous, and Emperor Yu's children had fingers in every pie in the galaxy. Lancia was what had kept the Alliance together so long when it should have imploded from corruption and old age decades ago. But yes, Crown Princess Michelle was the most dangerous. And the most
charismatic. And the most beautiful. Rossi let the confluence take him for a moment, thinking of that beauty.

He shivered and forced his mind back to the meeting.

“Exactly,” Naidan said. “And she's coming here, probably with representatives from every Alliance world.”

Rossi didn't envy Rebekah her job.

“So she comes, she looks, she goes.”

Naidan snorted inelegantly. Rossi leaned back to avoid the delicate spray of wine that came out through her nose. This was one of the reasons she did backroom work, and people like Rebekah and he liaised with outsiders.

The first course arrived then, giving him time to regroup and reconsider while the waiter set the food in front of them.

The line cartels had always had a close association with Gate Union.

In the early days, when humans were just learning to use the lines, there had been no limits on the jumps. They lost five rich solar systems before they realized that ships coming out in the same space caused explosions that didn't destroy just the ships, it destroyed space near them as well. When they finally understood the cause, the worlds had implemented a booking system, overseen by a central bureau. At first it had been a loose consortium of worlds that had to work together for their own safety. Over time, those worlds had turned into the main trading routes, making them some of the richest in the galaxy.

Then, fifty years ago, the Alliance had tried to wrest control of the gates at Roscracia through political pressure. Some speculated it was because they realized the union of gate worlds had become a threat to their dominance. Others believed that they simply wanted their own part in the riches. Whatever the reason—the Alliance never said, and Rossi didn't care, but it had to be one of the stupidest political moves of all time—it had led to the official signing of the Gate Union Treaty, supposedly simply to reduce bureaucracy between the worlds, but everyone knew it was to cement power against the Alliance.

Nowadays, Gate Union's power rivaled that of the Alliance. Not only that, the recent treaty they had signed with Redmond meant that most of the line factories now came under Gate Union auspices as well.

All of them, Rossi reminded himself, remembering the earthquake at Shaolin.

Linesmen clustered where the lines were, because that was where the work was. Thus it was to their mutual benefit for the cartels to work with Gate Union.

The cartels considered the confluence theirs, which meant it was effectively also Gate Union territory. They wouldn't take kindly to the Alliance muscling in on it, and they'd expect the cartels to deal with it. That was obviously going to be Rossi's job.

His and Rebekah Grimes's. He poured himself another drink.

“I've seen the vids.” He hadn't taken much notice of them, being too busy with the confluence, but he'd still recognized many of the dignitaries who had arrived for the wedding. “She has some powerful people with her.”

Naidan snorted again. This time some of her wine sprayed onto his plate. He pushed his plate aside. “If Emperor Yu decrees a wedding, you can't not come even if you don't believe it will happen.”

But suppose he hadn't decreed a wedding. Suppose it was just a way to get the power brokers into one place for a preemptive strike at Gate Union. Especially coming so soon after the Alliance had called their members to a special security council, ostensibly to discuss Redmond's preemptive attack on the Haladean cluster, a minor skirmish that no one should have even worried about, least of all the other Alliance partners. Especially given everyone knew that the Alliance couldn't possibly take on Gate Union and win.

But if Lady Lyan was coming here, then she could only be taking Gate Union on. Coming to the confluence was an out-and-out declaration of hostility. Even though the Alliance had nothing to win and everything to lose in the confrontation.

Maybe the Alliance knew that if Gate Union got any stronger, it would definitely lose. Doing it at this time, it had some chance of winning, or at least of forcing a standoff.

It was the kind of thing Lady Lyan would do. Bold, brassy, and totally unexpected.

Rossi leaned back in his chair. “Has anyone contacted Gate Union?”

EAN LAMBERT

EAN WOKE NAKED,
and for the second day in a row, he couldn't remember where he was or how he'd gotten there.

He lay and stared at the unfamiliar ceiling. He was on a ship. He'd been fixing the lines. No, that was another ship. The lines on this ship were clear and good. Line one was happy. Line six was . . . He closed his eyes. Line six was good, but the captain wasn't happy with him, and he'd made a complete fool of himself over line ten. He curled up and pulled the quilt over himself, suddenly cold.

They owned his contract. They could ensure he never worked as a linesman again.

He blinked hard, eyes gritty. Stupid to get emotional over things he couldn't control. And he would work with the lines. Nothing could stop that even if he wasn't part of a cartel.

He couldn't remember going to bed. He remembered weaving his way down to his room like a drunk, stripping off as soon as he entered the apartment, making direct for the fresher because he wasn't sure if he was going to be sick or just wanted to be clean. He remembered sitting on the floor of the fresher, knees to his chin in the tiny cramped space,
long after the water cycle had finished. After that, he couldn't remember a thing.

Ean sighed and sat up. He didn't know what would happen now, but he'd slept away half the day cycle. Not a smart thing to do on the first day of your new job, especially not if you'd given your employers real cause to doubt your abilities the night before.

His formal clothes were on the bench built into the opposite wall. He looked at the precisely folded bundles with foreboding. He didn't remember doing that, and he had never been good at taking care of clothes.

Don't think about it. Act as if nothing happened.

He shaved, but didn't shower. If they were rationing water, they probably rationed it by the tenday. He didn't want to use up his allocation in the first two days.

Radko was seated on one of the couches in the living area. She jumped up as Ean came out. “Sir.”

“Why don't you just call me Ean.” He wondered if he was under arrest for injuring the two top-ranking people on the ship.

“Yes, sir.”

Ean gave that one up for the moment. “So what happens now?” He didn't know what to do, where to go. And if he was under arrest, he probably couldn't go anywhere.

“Medic first,” Radko said promptly. “Then food. Then I'm to take you down to the briefing room.”

He followed Radko's long-legged stride down the corridor, trying to keep up, but he ached all over, and when a machine on line three flared into use, his bones vibrated with the feel of it.

Two people waited at the hospital, but the medic took him first. He felt bad about that. Radko leaned one booted foot against the wall and swapped insults with the sick men as he went in. He hoped neither of them was badly ill.

“Let me have a look at you,” the medic said, and Ean stripped for his second medical in two days.

“Does this happen every time you go through the void?”

He wanted to lie. Whoever heard of a linesman grade ten who didn't travel? “This is my second trip.”

“And did it happen the first time?”

“I . . . something. I'm not really sure. It was years ago. I was untrained. I didn't know what to expect.” It hadn't been as bad as this. Maybe his tutors were right. Maybe you couldn't learn the lines as an adult. Not properly, anyway.

The medic was gentle, but Ean had to grit his teeth in order not to wince. As a boy, he'd been beaten by his father when his father smoked Juice until he'd learned to stay away from home after the Juice dealer had been through. It felt like that, which was stupid because he was unmarked.

“And your bones?” the medic asked.

“Bone-weary” was a term Ean had never thought had a literal meaning, but right now that was how he felt. As if his bones were too tired to hold him up.

The medic looked at his face. “I wish I'd seen what happened,” he said.

He wouldn't have wanted to be there.

“You can get dressed.” He helped Ean up, almost as if he realized Ean wasn't sure he could manage it himself. “I want to see you back here every day until I say otherwise. And I want to know all the symptoms. Including those you haven't told me today.” He walked to the door with him. “And you'll do every jump under observation. I'll make sure Captain Helmo doesn't jump until you are here at the hospital.”

Which was really going to endear him to the captain.

Radko left off baiting the other two spacers as he came out. Neither of them seemed the worse for the extra wait.

“Bring him back tomorrow,” the medic told Radko.

“Yes, sir.”

Maybe she just called everybody sir.

She led him out at the same fast pace. He struggled to keep up. “The mess is open all hours,” she said, then stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “You should probably eat in the VIP dining room.”

He couldn't take Admiral Katida or Tarkan Heyington right now. “All they'll do is hand me things to carry.” Even if he had no right in the mess, he wouldn't have to be social.

A dimple showed. It looked like Michelle's dimple. “They would,” she agreed, friendlier suddenly.

The mess was quiet at this hour. The chef cooked Ean up a huge meal, despite Ean's protests that he wasn't hungry. After the first mouthfuls, he realized he was hungry after all, and that it tasted good. Radko, seated opposite, ate a smaller portion of the same meal with gusto. If this was typical of the fare, then the crew were well fed. But then, he could have got that from line one. Or could he? Could you break the line down into specifics like that? Ean, strong enough now with food inside him, listened to the song of line one and tried to separate out anything to do with food.

The lines were clear in his head. Clearer than they had been yesterday. It was as if going through the void had switched something on and forgotten to turn it off again. Which was impossible, of course.

All he could get was something about Empire cake.

“What is Empire cake?” he asked.

Radko pushed aside her empty plate with a sigh of pleasure. “You've heard about that, have you?”

He half shrugged.

“And let's hope we're rid of this lot before it happens,” Radko said. “Because I don't want them spoiling the tradition.” She looked at him and blushed. “Sorry. I didn't mean—”

“Empire cake?” he prompted.

“The Crown Princess's birthday cake. It's divine. And only ever made on this ship. It takes weeks to prepare. Chefs were buying ingredients while Princess Michelle and Commodore Galenos were out hunting tens.”

It was interesting that she called Michelle by her Lancastrian title. Or maybe not, because it was a Lancastrian ship, but off Lancia, she was generally known as Lady Lyan—all the legitimate children were known as Lord or Lady Lyan—because on many other worlds the title prince or princess was reserved for the ruler.

Her birthday must be close if the cake figured so prominently in the lines.

“It's more than just the cake,” Radko said. “It's the tradition. We've all been with her a long time.”

“Even you?” She didn't look old enough to have been anywhere a long time.

“Ten years in two tendays,” she said.

Which meant she had to be at least his own age. “You came straight from training to here?”

“No one comes straight from training to here. I spent two years in general corps first, then three in Special Weapons.”

Maybe older. She didn't look it.

Radko dimpled at him. Her dimples were exactly the same as Michelle's. Come to think of it, her eyes were the same shape too, if a lighter blue, and even though her short hair was honey brown, it waved in the same place Michelle's did. She glanced at her comms. “Finish your plate,” she said. “You'll want to be at the next briefing.”

He would? Ean finished his meal, and she showed him where to put the dirty plate. She was thorough, at least, at training him in all the right things to do. He just hoped he remembered it next time. After which she led him at a quick trot back to the briefing room, which turned out to be the dining room from last night. This time he could almost keep up.

There was one spare seat. Radko pushed him toward it, and he slid in just as Captain Helmo started speaking. Radko leaned back against the wall near him and lifted a boot to set against it in what he was coming to recognize as her characteristic waiting pose. Surely she didn't have to wait for him. Was he really under guard?

“A 4.15-kilometer circumference,” the captain said, and the ship flashed on-screen. Ean promptly forgot Radko.

It was a sphere. The surface was a deep blue-black that should have blended with space and made it impossible to see, but the blue gave it just enough color. On the curve of the sphere, they could see the distorted reflection of another ship. It was so clear they could read the markings on the side.
EMPIRE SUN
, from the Haladean cluster.

“It's a perfect sphere,” the captain said. “Our scientists say there isn't a single blemish.”

The image changed to a Haladean warship. “The Haladeans sent two ships.” Captain Helmo paused. “The images are of the first ship, taken from the second ship. The first ship is ten kilometers out, the second, thirty.”

Even in port, the larger ships tethered hundreds of kilometers apart and let the shuttles go between. A big ship
stopped mostly by inertia. Whoever had taken a warship that close to two other ships had a damn good pilot.

Two yellow lines showed under the image. One was three times as long as the other.

Two smaller shuttles, bristling with guns, detached from the side of the closer ship. A line at the bottom of the screen counted off the meters as the ship inched closer. More than one of the military audience members shuddered.

A third line appeared under the other two, and a counter started at ten and counted down as the ships moved forward: 9.9; 9.8.

At 9.7 kilometers, the sphere pulsed green. They watched the pulse come toward the shuttles. Both shuttles disappeared. The pulse kept going. Then, suddenly, the ship was gone, too. Still the pulse kept going. The kilometer line crept up. Past ten kilometers. Past twenty. Past thirty. The viewscreen glowed brighter and brighter green. Then everything went black.

“The ship was transmitting right to the end,” the captain said quietly.

Michelle took up the story. “The Haladeans came to us.”

Even Ean knew the Haladeans were at war with Redmond. They could ill afford to spare warships even to examine something like this, and they definitely couldn't afford to have them blown up.

“We—the Alliance—gave them ships in return for . . .” She waved an arm at the black screen. “We have five ships at a hundred kilometers out, all ready to jump at the slightest sign of a pulse.”

“But what about the lines?” asked Governor Jade. “How will the linesmen help?”

“Every ship has linesmen up to at least level six,” the captain said, and he could have been looking straight at Ean, or maybe Ean was just feeling guilty. “The linesmen on the Haladean ship identified the presence of something that felt like lines on the alien ship. They said that in the messages they sent back. Our own linesmen corroborated that when we arrived. They didn't know what level, only that it's greater than six.”

Line nine was the void, and line ten twisted the void and moved whatever was in the void to a different place, but no
one really knew what lines seven and eight did. Maybe this was where they found out.

No one knew where the lines had come from. They weren't human, that was for sure. All anyone knew from the history tapes was that the derelict ship they had been found on had changed ownership at least three times before it had arrived at the scrap heap at Chamberley, where a trader named Havortian had used his last credits to purchase it to repair damage to his own ship caused by a collision with an asteroid.

Havortian had a time-sensitive load and no money for real repairs, so instead of melting the ship down and using the metal to create a new outer hull for himself, he'd welded the newly purchased body onto his own cargo hold, made it airtight, and left to finish his job.

The weld was cheap and poorly done. A third of the way into the trip, the Havortians started to leak air. There was nowhere close enough to land before their air ran out. They were going to die.

According to legend, Havortian's nine-year-old daughter—a strange, solitary creature by most accounts—was able to communicate with the lines. When they knew they were doomed, Gila Havortian went around the ship saying good-bye to everything. She said good-bye to the lines, too, then had to explain why. The lines had asked her why the ship didn't just go through the void.

The linesmen and scientists laughed at the legend, of course, and said it didn't happen like that, but it was a nice story.