Space Captain Smith (2 page)

‘Interesting,’ Suruk said. ‘This vessel has clearly fought many battles. Is that camouflage on the upper part, or just mould?’

‘My God,’ said Smith, ‘I thought they said it had been refitted! It looks terrible!’

‘Maybe. But the orange warpaint will bring us luck.’

‘I bloody doubt it: that lucky orange warpaint happens to be rust. The sooner we launch the better. Let’s get going before the wings drop off.’

He walked around the side of the ship and down its length, reminding himself that this was a space vessel and not the chew-toy of some very large, enthusiastic dog. Even in this bad light it was clear how much of a beating the craft had taken. Extra armour was welded over blackened patches that could have been the result of dramatic space battles or drunken parking attempts. The few windows were scratched and had a dirty greenish tinge, as if viewed through pond-water. Smith had an image of the previous pilot, joystick in one hand, hip flask in the other, whooping like a redneck as he bounced from world to world in a state of crazed exuberance, frequently mistaking the nose-cone for a deceleration tool. He climbed the steps and pressed the intercom button and it let out a tortured mechanical yowl. The noise stopped and a woman’s voice said warily, ‘Are you selling something?’

‘I’m the captain. Could you open the door, please?’

‘Er… yeah, alright. Can’t see why not.’

Something moved heavily behind the door; bolts drawing back, he thought. ‘It’s open,’ the woman said. Smith turned the sunken handle and the door swung open easily.

The hinges had been greased recently; so too, from the smell of the place, had everything else. Smith ducked under the dangling cable of an intercom and stepped into the cramped hallway, tasting the air as much as smelling it. Suruk pulled the door closed behind him. ‘I shall choose a room as my own.’

‘Righto,’ said Smith.

To the left was the cockpit. It had two proper seats and several which could be folded down in an emergency. One of the large seats – the pilot’s – was currently occupied by a smallish woman of about thirty. There was a hamster cage on the other seat – the captain’s – with the word
Gerald
taped to the front. As Smith entered, the woman took her boots off the main console, sat up and looked about for something to mark the page in the book she had been reading.

‘Ah,’ Smith said, consulting the roster sheet, ‘you must be the crew. Miss Carveth, is it?’

She stood up. She was smallish and slightly-built, with a pretty, perky face that was at once unremarkable and difficult to dislike. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail, leaving a halo of brown roots around her forehead. It was a face that Smith had seen before: she was a simulant, and this was one of the standard facial models that the manufacturers used. She wore a white shirt and utility waistcoat. Her trousers had many pockets and were slightly too big, and had been turned up at the bottom.

‘Polly Carveth at your service, within reason,’ she said, looking him over. ‘You’re Captain Smith, right?’ She had the demeanour of someone keen not to be volunteered for things.

‘Indeed. Pleased to meet you. Do feel free to stand at ease.’

Nothing changed. She could not have got much more at ease without lying down. They shook hands.

‘Nice to meet you,’ Carveth said warily. ‘I look forward to us working together,’ she added, with the raw enthusiasm of one reading out a train timetable at gunpoint. She glanced over his shoulder and suddenly her face became more animated. ‘Pissing heck, what the hell is that?’

‘Ah,’ said Smith. ‘My friend, Suruk. He’ll be joining us for the trip.’

Carveth had acquired an expression rarely seen outside Greek tragedy. She groped for words. ‘Why?’

‘Well, he’s a friend of mine. It’s useful for aliens to see the Empire. It helps them understand where all their hard work goes. Besides, he’s quite comfortable with space travel. He’s brought his own things for his cabin, and he’s even decorated it with a stool.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘Stool as in chairs, not dung.’

She brightened slightly, but not much. ‘But, he’s
big
,’

Carveth observed. ‘And he’s got all those bones stuck to him!’

‘He’s my friend, Carveth,’ Smith said coldly, tiring of this argument. ‘He stays on.’

Her face came back to life. She considered the matter for a moment, which made her jaw move as if chewing the cud. ‘He’s got tusks and mandibles. It’s pretty irregular, Captain.’

‘Mr Khan said I could.’

A second passed in which it became obvious to Smith that she was resisting the temptation to repeat his last sentence back to him in a squeaky voice.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘if it makes you feel any better, I will talk to Suruk myself. But I am the captain here, and we are taking off as I say.’

‘Alright, Boss.’

Smith left the room. Carveth crept across the cockpit, to the open door, and listened.

‘Pilots are like that,’ Smith was saying. ‘A lot of them think of their ships as belonging to them.’

‘A lot of people think of their heads as belonging to them.’

‘Don’t start that. You’re on the in-flight meals only for this trip. Alright?’

‘Huh. As you wish.’

Smith returned to find Carveth in the pilot’s seat. He placed the hamster cage on the floor, dropped into the captain’s seat and said, ‘Righto. We’re all set. I’ve spoken to Suruk and he’s agreed to treat you with kid gloves, as it were.’

‘Good,’ she said, and she gave him a wan, nervous smile. ‘Let’s go then, shall we?’

‘In a minute. First, as captain I need to tour the facilities.’

‘Second on the left. Don’t flush until we’re in orbit.’

Isambard Smith slowly wandered the inside of the ship, making sure that everything was alright. Everything certainly seemed present, but beyond that his knowledge thinned out somewhat. Behind the cockpit were the cabins and lavatory. To her credit, Carveth had resisted the common practice of putting a humorous sign on the toilet door about the Captain’s log. Beyond that was an open area that served as a combination of galley and mess. On a longer voyage, capsules would be mounted here for suspended animation. The rear of the ship was taken up by the hold, largely empty, where an exploration vehicle could be stashed but was not. Behind it all were the engine and the various ‘boiler rooms’, which Smith intended to have as little to do with as possible.

As with every such tour he did, he had no idea what he was looking for beyond the strikingly obvious. A fire in his bed, or a man’s feet hanging from the ceiling, would have given him reasonable suspicion that something was amiss; one blinking red light among whole rows of panels of red lights could have been any old thing. And besides, that was someone else’s job. As captain, he could delegate to another crewmember. That was why ships had captains: to tell the crew what their responsibilities were. Unfortunately, discounting Suruk, an alien, and Gerald, a rodent, that left Carveth as the only possible delegate. Finally, Suruk joined him. The alien pointed into the Secondary Air Cleansing Drum and said, ‘This is the bladder of the ship, yes?’ and Smith wondered who he was trying to impress. ‘Absolutely,’ he said, and he returned to the cockpit. ‘Ready for takeoff,’ he declared. Carveth was reading the Haynes manual for a Sheffield Class Four light freighter. Smith noticed that by an odd coincidence this ship was also of that make. He felt mildly bothered, but could not quite put his finger on the source of the problem.

‘Takeoff, takeoff,’ Carveth muttered, running a finger down the page. ‘One moment… set thrusters.’

The control panel, like much of the ship’s inside, was squashed and complex. The levers, dials and spinning counters were separated by delicate brass scrollwork and Engineering Guild heraldry. Compared to the exterior, the inside of the ship was quite well kept.

A loud, indistinct hydraulic whine ran through the room as the great thrusters either side of the craft turned to fire downwards. Smith could hear the engines thrumming, shuddering with constrained power that ran through the floor and into the soles of his boots. On a hundred dials the needles quivered and stood up like hairs on the back of an understandably frightened neck. He leaned back and closed his eyes, feeling the craft come to life around him and tense itself to spring.

‘We have permission to leave from control,’ Carveth said.

‘Thank them.’

‘They say good luck. Cleared for takeoff.’

He opened his eyes. There was a row of junk across the windowsill, picked up from the myriad gift-shops of the Empire: a snow-storm paperweight of the Houses of Parliament, a red-coated toy soldier of the Colonial Army, a postcard showing a very fat woman on a trampoline with the caption ‘Rotation of the Spheres on the Proxima Orbiter’. The left side of the ship lurched upward, and Parliament vanished in a blizzard. The postcard fell over. The right thrusters blasted and the ship levelled, rocking very slightly, nine feet off the ground.

‘Feed power equally to the thrusters,’ Carveth told herself, and the ship rose slowly. A small and agitated figure had appeared on the outside viewscreen, seeming to perform a shamanistic dance. Parker’s frequent upward gestures gave the impression that he sought to placate the sky god before the ship intruded into its realm. ‘Whatever’s he up to?’ said Smith as the craft rose higher and the figure became increasingly smaller and more frantic.

Carveth clicked her fingers as if remembering something on a shopping list and picked up the microphone. ‘Control? Could you open the overhead doors, please?’

The ship ascended. The top of the hangar sank down the windscreen, and suddenly they were surrounded by blue sky. Across the skyline, the thousand chimneys of New London stabbed upward like the mounds of a chainsmoking termite colony. Smith felt the ship tilt backwards, rising all the time, and hoped that Suruk had remembered to strap himself in.

‘Here we go,’ Carveth said, casually knocking half a dozen switches down with the side of her hand. ‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

She fired the engine. With a great roar the ship tore upwards into the sky. In seconds the blue on the screen thinned and darkened into the black of space as they left New London far below. The simulant pulled a keyboard down on a metal arm, and her fingers raced across the keys.

She sat back. ‘Co-ordinates are locked,’ she said. ‘We’re on our way.’

‘Journey will take about twelve hours,’ Carveth said, scrutinising one of the screens. ‘We’re on a standard Imperial route, no danger of trouble from aliens or hostile powers. We’ll dock at New Fran at about nine am, GMT. Once we’re there, we’ll have a few hours to do what we want and get ready for the next leg. The next stage is to double back into Imperial territory and work our way down towards Midlight. That should take a little longer – three days, possibly. So remember to stock up on mints at the duty-free.’

‘Wise,’ Suruk said, lounging against the wall. He had wandered in shortly after takeoff and was watching space with almost complete indifference.

Smith activated the navigation console and studied the route that had been programmed in at base, a confusing snail-trail across the border of the Empire. It struck him as just as likely to have been produced by a cat with an etch-a-sketch as a trained navigator. He decided to leave it alone, in case any attempt at reprogramming caused the Typing Assistant programme to appear on the screen and drive him mad with irritation as he tried to make it go away.

‘Any foreseeable problems?’ Smith inquired. Carveth shrugged. ‘Nothing obvious. The only thing I would say is that New Fran is a Protected Territory, not a full British colony. The laws are different there.’

‘Do they permit trophy killing?’ Suruk said.

‘I doubt it,’ Smith replied. ‘As far as I know, it’s pretty liberal there – but not
that
liberal. Personal firearms are illegal, and your spears probably will be as well. No chance of bagging anything, I’m afraid. Shame, really, with these sissy free love types bothering everyone. I wouldn’t stand for it, personally. If a chap tried to stick a flower down my barrel, I’d shoot off soon as blinking.’

‘This is not my kind of a holiday,’ Suruk said.

‘Well, it certainly is mine,’ Carveth said. She leaned back in the pilot’s seat and sighed. ‘Trip to New Fran? Yes please. People save up for that. I reckon it should be a good few hours we get to spend there. I don’t get much chance to let my hair down. Have a few drinks, shake hands with Mr Bong… suits me.’

‘I must say,’ said Smith, ‘what with you being a simulant and all, you don’t seem much like a robot. Shouldn’t you be counting rivets or something, not looking forward to getting squiffed?’

She looked around, frowning. ‘I’m not a robot, as such. I am a person of synthetic heritage.’

‘Does that mean your parents were robots, then? Did they hear the patter of tinny feet?’

‘Most amusing,’ Carveth said. ‘I am a simulant. I would also accept “android”, meaning one created rather than born. I am, however, almost entirely human tissue: I don’t have wires or wallpaper paste inside me or anything like that, nor have I ever felt urges towards a pocket calculator. I’m altered to be able to interface directly with the ship, should it be necessary, except that this ship isn’t actually fitted with a neural interface at all. That’s about where it ends.’

‘So someone designed you?’

‘Yes,’ she said, a little sadly. She brightened up. ‘And you thought it was just a terrible mistake.’

‘Well… I did wonder.’

Carveth turned to study the navigation screen. ‘People get the wrong idea. I blame science-fiction writers, personally. It annoys me how they confuse the whole robot issue. I tell you, if I met that Asimov bloke, I’d harm him, or at least through inaction allow him to come to harm.’

‘Does that mean you have a skull, then?’ Suruk said.

‘Not that you’re having, frogboy.’

‘Point made,’ said Suruk. ‘What is that on the scanner, fun-size woman?’

‘Where?’ The simulant leaned across and peered at the lidar dial. ‘Probably just a rock… Wait a moment.’

‘What’s up?’ said Smith.

‘It’s moving. Intercept course.’