Ship of Destiny

by Frank Chadwick

  Johnny was a chemist, but Johnny is no more

  For what he thought was H2O, was H2SO4

  He rode in the passenger compartment only with Te’Anna, who looked very odd in her own hazard suit. It was comforting to know the Guardians weren’t impervious to acid. They were immune to just about everything else. He now had an opportunity to ask what had been bothering him for several days.

  “Why did you make me release you without telling me your plan? Was it a test of my trust?”

  “No. At least I did not intend it to be. I told you it was necessary for my plan to work, and it was. It enabled me to tell K’Irka nothing but the truth, including that you had given my freedom without condition. I seldom if ever lie; it damages one’s credibility and usually to little purpose as a lie is so easy to detect. She certainly would have detected a direct lie from me.”

  “Well, you didn’t lie, but you certainly deceived her.”

  “Oh, I think sentient beings mostly deceive themselves.”

  Some of his skepticism must have shown in his face. She wagged her head from side to side.

  “Sometimes I help them a little,” she admitted.

  He looked back out at the lifeless yellow landscape rising up to meet them. No, not entirely lifeless, he thought. There were thirty-seven New People down there who had lived on the surface of Haydoos for over five hundred years and were likely to continue doing so for a very, very long time. Usually they were dispersed across this hemisphere of the moon in work parties, recovering rare transition metals in volcanic rock, vomited up from the molten core of the moon.

  Hard telling how those transition metals got there to begin with, but they were there, mostly lanthanides but a fair chunk of actinides as well. The Guardians needed those elements for advanced electronics as much as the Cottohazz did, but it was hard to find them in concentrations high enough to make extraction practical, unless you had a smallish moon with a molten metallic core rich in them and a lot of active volcanism going on. Then you just had to locate the surface deposits, mine the ore containing the good stuff, process and smelt it, and send it up the needle to the shipyard.

  But the New People working down here, the ones the Guardians called the On-Living Engineers, spent much of their time so dispersed it would have been nearly impossible to find the ones they needed and enlist their help, partly because they were so singlemindedly dedicated to the job, or at least so K’Irka claimed. Sam and Te’Anna had waited four days in order to time their arrival with one of the periodic gatherings of the ore miners at the needle downstation to begin the smelting process, the only time most of the ground personnel gathered in one place. The wait made Sam nervous. They had negotiated a three-day truce with the Troatta warships, a truce which had expired yesterday. Newtonian mechanics gave them three more days; the Troatta had only managed to decelerate to a dead stop relative to Seven-Echo today and would take those three extra days to get back here, but if all went well the Bay should be gone by then.

  If.

  “You sure this is going to work?” he asked Te’Anna.

  “Of course it will work,” she answered. “The only questions is how it will work: usefully or disastrously.”

  Sam looked at her and shook his head.

  “I think you do that on purpose,” he said.

  “I have no notion what you mean,” she answered. She tried to ruffle her neck feathers but her gloved fingers encountered the hazard suit fabric instead. She shifted her balance from one foot to another and Sam realized she was nervous about the outcome. She had no real skin in this game, was likely to come out fine no matter who won. Guardians apparently didn’t kill other Guardians, despite her assault of K’Irka. But she was still nervous, which meant her anxiety was for Sam and the others. She really had been surprised the station had not held the answer to the problem, and now she was genuinely frightened for them. She actually cared.

  “Thank you, Te’Anna,” Sam said, “for all the help you have given us. Whether this works out usefully or disastrously, we will never forget what you have done.”

  And then he did something he had never imagined doing. He put his arm around her shoulder and hugged her. She stood still for a moment, then turned to him and enfolded him in her arms, head lowered and resting on the top of his helmet.

  “Oh,” she said, a plaintive note in her voice, “yet another unaccustomed feeling.”

  Te’Anna stood with Bitka near the wall of the enormous enclosed receiving bay, and she marveled at the noisy swirl of vehicular activity, eight-wheeled ore carriers with huge solid-looking tires backing up and dumping their loads into broad bins set into the floor, where mechanical conveyors moved the rocks away for processing. The floor and walls were yellow with sulfur dust, the air thick with it.

  New People shuffled through the vehicle traffic, waving and directing the massive vehicles, but they were unlike any New People Te’Anna had ever seen. They were hairless, weathered, tough-looking workers who moved with assurance, barked orders, and wiped perspiration from their damaged faces. And they were damaged, much of their skin showing the glossy texture of scar tissue. Acid burns, undoubtedly. They all wore protective clothing, but accidents happen—after five hundred years, many accidents. She knew all of this, had heard of it, but actually seeing it was different, and deeply unsettling.

  The New People worked in the receiving dock with their respirators pulled off their faces and Bitka made to take his off as well, but she stopped him.

  “No, Captain Bitka, their lungs are more robust than yours or mine. P’Daan’s object was not to kill them slowly, but punish them forever. He meant them to serve as an object lesson, but they have not turned out as he anticipated. He may still kill them someday.”

  “These guys are about the hardest-working and most organized crew I’ve ever seen,” Bitka said. “Are they on a tight deadline?”

  How to explain the On-Living Engineers?

  “No, there is no required schedule. There was one originally, but they exceeded it, and kept exceeding every schedule given them. Now they are simply allowed to work at their own pace, which is what you see.” She realized there was something very impressive about it, but also perverse.

  “See how the ones on foot weave in and out of the traffic?” Bitka said. “It’s like they know in advance where every vehicle is going to be ten seconds from now. And they do, don’t they? They’ve been doing exactly this job, and only this job, for hundreds of years. No wonder they’re so fucking good at it! But why are they ignoring you?”

  “You and I have nothing to do with their task,” Te’Anna said, and moved him gently back to make way for a small maintenance vehicle. “It is very hard to get them to stop concentrating on their task, but K’Irka gave me something which is supposed to help. I have never interacted with the On-Living Engineers before. They act almost as if they are in a trance.”

  “No,” Bitka said, “they act as if they’re real and we aren’t. They act as if we’re ghosts, or me anyway. Everybody they ever knew is dead, aren’t they? Everyone alive now will die and they will go on. Just them, along with you Guardians. For them, I’m just a ghost waiting to happen.”

  She looked at him, surprised as she so often was at the insights which seemed to just come to him, and this one brought her a moment of pain. “Yes, you are, Captain Bitka. Part of me misses you already.”

  Bitka looked away, seemed to take a deep breath. “Okay, let’s get this show on the road.”

  What an odd expression, she thought. “I assume you mean let us begin. We will in a moment. We must wait for their break period.”

  Bitka looked back at her, his face a portrait of skepticism. “They actually stop?”

  Twenty minutes later, Sam’s commlink vibrated. He was about to shift it to message mode when he saw Brook’s ID tag and the Urgent flag on the command channel. Sam stepped away from Te’Anna and into a corner of the work area.

  “Captain here. What’s wrong, XO?”

  We ju
st got hit with some kind of inert attack weapon, small pellets at high velocity.

  “From the station?”

  No sir. The station got hit as well, but it didn’t do any serious damage to them. We back-calculated the trajectory and it looks like it was fired from the other inhabited moon, Destie-Seven-Golf.

  “Damage?”

  Pretty bad, sir, most of it to the primary hull. Three of the four radiators are off-line, two cells of the power ring are torn up pretty badly, one of the one-point-five gig lasers is a total write-off, and we took a cluster of hits in forward engineering that wrecked all of our fabricators. The coil gun is inoperable, but Parker from engineering thinks we can get that back online, but that’s about the only good news, sir.

  “Casualties?”

  One rating dead, sir: Machinist Third Camorra from the auxiliary division. One chief, seven ratings, and four civilians injured but expected to recover, assuming we get out of here.

  Sam tried to remember Camorra but couldn’t put a face with the name. Killed by inert pellets at high velocity, about as simple a weapon as there was. In the previous war the uBakai had hit Sam’s ship with a weapon like that at the very start of hostilities, killing half a dozen shipmates. Fleet Intel had dubbed it buckshot.

  “We need to shut down whatever hit us from Seven-Golf.”

  Yes, sir. Alexander is on that. That Guardian K’Irka on the station sent us the ground layout of the Seven-Golf facilities. They’ve got a big mass driver they use to launch ore into orbit for transfer over here. Looks like they shot us with it. Our coil gun’s still down but we have our Mark Fours. Alexander’s working on a firing solution now, sir, and we have active sensors saturating the area, looking for additional incoming clusters.

  “Very well, XO. Fire when you have a solution. Keep me informed but act on your own initiative.”

  Aye, aye, sir.

  Te’Anna looked at him inquiringly.

  “Bad news. The other inhabited moon threw some rocks at the Bay and messed it up pretty bad. Not so bad we can’t still get out of here, but we need to get moving on a solution.”

  “This cannot be rushed, Captain,” she answered. “It should not be long now, however.”

  Half an hour later the On-Living Engineers, without any signal, all parked their vehicles, dismounted, and trooped through a hatch into the quarters section of the downstation. Te’Anna gestured for Sam to follow her and in short order they found themselves in a room with food and drink dispensers and a number of tables and chairs. The On-Living Engineers did not wait in line before the dispensers; each one seemed to know when it was their turn and rose to draw their meal. Sam and Te’Anna stood all but unnoticed by a blank wall until she spoke in that voice of command he had heard earlier.

  “I am the Guardian Te’Anna and I have a message for the coordinator from K’Irka and H’Stus. Who is the coordinator?”

  One of the New People raised his hand briefly without looking up from his meal. Te’Anna walked over to the table where he sat, took a metal vial from the pocket of her protective suit, took the cap off, and gave a quick spray of aerosol in front of the coordinator. He inhaled, paused, and then inhaled more deeply. He put down his fork and looked up from his food, an expression of surprise on his face. Sam came up beside her.

  “Jesus, you drugged him? I guess that’s one way of getting cooperation.”

  “Not a drug,” she answered. The air current carried the gas or whatever it as down the table and the other four New People seated there showed various signs of reaction, and in moments had stopped eating. Te’Anna had their undivided attention.

  “It is not a drug, Captain Bitka. It is simply the aroma of their homeworld. There is no more powerful sensory experience, persistent memory, or emotional catalyst, than scent.” She turned to the coordinator. “You understand who you are and who I am?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I remember. How is the Lifeground?”

  “Not as well as you remember it. P’Daan has brought strangers, ignorant of our ways. There was violence, death, and much destruction. It will take generations for the wounds to heal.”

  The coordinator lowered his face into his hands.

  “P’Daan still seeks the strangers. Their leader stands here with me. They came here against their will, meant no one any harm, and wish only to go on their way. Their star drive is locked, however, by P’Daan. You must unlock it for them so they can depart and the killing end.”

  “What damage to the Lifeground?” one of the others asked.

  “How many were killed?”

  “How did it happen?”

  Te’Anna held up her hand to quiet them. “It happened when the Eye of P’Daan attacked the strangers and they defended themselves. That much I saw myself. The strangers defended themselves, and killed the Eye of P’Daan, along with G’Baxus and De’Na.”

  “The killed three Guardians?” the coordinator asked and looked at Sam with an expression he couldn’t read. Wonder? Possibly. Maybe some envy. After all, these Desties were here being punished for trying to kill one Guardian, right? But they hadn’t succeeded. Sam had actually killed three of them.

  “P’Daan wishes you to stay?” he asked.

  That’s right, Sam thought. The guy who made you immortal so he could stick you in this hellhole of a mining moon and torture you forever would be really unhappy if the Bay got away. How would that be for payback?

  “We will never help you,” the coordinator said.

  It took over an hour to sort everything out, for Sam to start understanding what was going on. Te’Anna used her spray capsule to arouse the others, get them involved, part of the decision. It didn’t make any difference.

  At first Sam thought it was a sort of Stockholm Syndrome, where the abused prisoners begin identifying with their captor, and maybe it was, but not like any case he’d ever heard about. They didn’t identify with P’Daan at all; they despised him and lived to frustrate his plan for them. But how do you do that when he’s holding all of the cards? When a guy makes you immortal just so he can punish you by making you do the shittiest job in the universe, forever, what can you do about it?

  A few of them killed themselves, but P’Daan apparently had some kind of automated mobile auto-docs that were really good at recovering and resuscitating the recently dead. The recovery process was pretty excruciating. Some Engineers managed a good enough job of the suicide they couldn’t be brought back, but the ones who were left had decided allowing P’Daan to force them to kill themselves was a form of surrender, and they didn’t feel like surrendering. So what option did that leave them with?

  Own the job. Don’t just do it, don’t just do it well, take joy and pride in doing it better than anyone ever could. Because if you really love it, it’s not punishment. That was the only way they could cheat P’Daan out of his vengeance. That’s what Te’Anna had meant when she said things had not turned out as he planned, and that he might end up just killing them after all. But if he did, that would be their victory, which was probably all that kept P’Daan from doing it. They were one tough, stubborn bunch of bastards, and that meant they were not going to do anything that P’Daan could interpret as a sign of discontent. It was too bad for the people on the Bay, but as far as the Engineers were concerned, their struggle of wills with P’Daan would go on long after everyone on the Bay was dead, no matter what they did or did not do to help.

  Sam’s commlink vibrated.

  “Yes, XO.”

  Captain Bitka, we’ve got a Mark Four on the way to take out the mass driver, but radar says those two Troatta ships you and that Varoki so-called diplomat let get away have managed to reverse course and are accelerating back toward us, looking for a fight. They’ll be here in three days and the two ships from the inner system will be here the day after that.

  The ships he and Haykuz let get away? Sam was surprised to feel himself nearly overwhelmed by a wave of animosity toward Ka’Deem Brook. He wanted to ride back up the needle to the highstation,
get a PSRV over to Cam Ranh Bay, and punch Brook, physically hurt him. Sam closed his eyes and breathed deeply, slowly, letting the anger flow through him and, to some extent, away. Why was he so angry? Why was he ever angry? His anger was always at himself, but then redirected to someone else.

  He was angry because he’d let the Troatta go to avoid the uncertainties of battle, uncertainties which could have left the Bay a crippled wreck after one lucky shot, and now that’s exactly what it was anyway. His truce with the Troatta had been temporary, had to be, because they would never surrender while they had power and weapons. Those crippled wrecks earlier had been one thing, but their code of honor wouldn’t allow ships still capable of killing the enemy to just throw in the towel. That’s not who they were. Haykuz had learned that about them and Sam understood it. The truce was the best they could manage, a respite to let Sam find the solution to everything else, because where there was a chance, he’d find a way. He always did, didn’t he? But now that solution was crumbling before his eyes, and he was angry because Ka’Deem Brook’s insinuation of failure was right on the money.

  Captain, are you still there?

  “Of course I’m still here, Mister Brook. Where else would I be? Keep me informed of any additional developments.”

  Sam cut the circuit and turned back to the Engineers, those scarred, magnificent, immortal sons of bitches whose stubbornness was the stuff of legends and which was going to get his passengers and crew killed, or worse. He walked back to the table and used his vox-box for the first time.

  “I have a proposal for you. Will you repair my ship and help my people escape if in turn I can help you do a service to P’Daan which he will value above everything else? It is something he burns for, but he and all the warships he has brought into the system have been unable to attain it. After his failures, for you to be the ones to give him the prize will be his ultimate humiliation.”

  “What is the prize?” the coordinator said.