by Jerry
Still, we hold their catalogs close: fabric and metal; wind and rain.
We try to remember their faces.
At sunset, Mumma goes to the open wall facing the ocean.
“You don’t need to stay,” she says, stubborn, maybe a little selfish.
But there she is so there I am beside her and soon Varyl also.
All of us, the sunset painting our faces bright. And then, for a moment before us out over the sea, there she is too, our Lillit, blowing soft against our cheeks.
We stretch out our arms to hug her and she weaves between them like a breath.
RED SHIFT
R.S. Belcher
Yeah, you heard right, I’m the one with the ghost story. I know, I know, in this enlightened age of chimera cults and O-drives, Superintelligences and genetic time travel, who’s got time for ghosts anymore? Yet, here you are, sitting on a barstool, light years from the old hometown, waiting to hear all about it. Well, you bought me a round, and if Yusef didn’t toss you out the door already you must know your bow from your aft on a starship, so why the hell not? Been a spell since I told it.
I see you noticed my complexion. Don’t worry, it ain’t viral. I used to captain what they called a “hothouse freighter.” These days, with the newer O-drives, there’s not much use for them anymore, but back in those days there was money to be made by getting cargo out to the fringes faster than anyone else. We ran our drives hot—two hundred to three hundred times past safety specifications. We also tore out as much of the shielding as we could get away with to lessen our mass and free up cargo space.
The look on your face tells me what you’re thinking. Let’s get something straight: I wasn’t some passenger-spacing waste bag. I told my crew up-front what they were facing, the dangers and the rewards. Those were tougher times than you grew up in, my friend. The Terra Barons who make or break the commodities markets these days were dirt-poor homesteaders back then, scraping for a living on some barely habitable rock a few decades past ’forming. Those were hard days, even for folks back on Gaia. Lots of space hands were desperate enough, hungry enough, crazy enough, to take a risk. You run on a hothouse freighter for a few years, if you’re lucky, you make your fortune and retire. If you ain’t lucky, or you overstay your welcome, you end up like me, or worse.
But you came for ghosts, not ghoulies, didn’t you?
My boat was named the Annabelle Lee. Probably a jinx to name a ship that, but my dad loved Poe and in time, so did I. I know he was born and dead long ’fore man went a-spacing, but there is something about his writing—he understood what it meant to be alone, all alone in a vast darkness. Poe was a spacer at heart. Hank Williams Sr., too.
Since I can see you have no idea who I’m talking about, I’ll move on to where it began: with the fare.
The Annabelle Lee was in port on Gostrum Station about 30 ’secs past the Taurus spur. In those days, the Commonwealth hadn’t creeped out that far yet, so it was a wide-open port. No inspectors, no marshals, just people with cargo to move and crews looking to move it.
I was a lot prettier back then, not that you’d care. I was sitting at a Trade-con kiosk, making a bid to run a load of Chinese perishables out to Di Jun when a man sat down beside me.
“I hear you own a fast ship,” he said. “I want to charter it.”
“Sorry,” I said as I entered my offer onto the screen with a blink of the eye-mouse. “Don’t do charters, don’t do passengers. Too little money, too much hassle.”
“I’ll double what you just bid for that Chinese cargo,” he said. “One passenger, me. Some equipment, which I will need to link up to your sensors and communications arrays. Nothing illegal, I assure you. I’m a scientist.”
I turned to regard him. He was Old Euro, what they used to call Caucasian. Thin, too thin—sick thin, like a nerve junkie. His eyes were clear, though—wicked smart even. He wore a beard, not by choice, but from neglect.
“Scientist, huh? Yeah, never had one of those cause any trouble before. You look like trouble to me.”
“I’m trouble that can pay in advance,” he said. “I need a ship, the fastest ship I can find. Everyone says that it’s the Annabelle Lee.”
“Running from something?”
“Toward something, actually. The equipment will boost your ship’s sensors and communications capabilities significantly,” he said. “You can keep it as a bonus. Please. I promise you no trouble.”
He waved his palm in front of the screen. A smaller screen opened as the sensors detected his implant. His face hovered on the screen, next to his gene code, fingerprints and mind map profile. It showed his name: Desmond Stapleton; his occupation: senior astrocommunications engineer with Parsons-Ito-Ngumbe; and his credit rating. I blinked when I saw it.
“If this is a forgery, it’s the best I ever seen,” I said as I canceled the Chinese bid and accessed my own implant data with a wave of my hand across the screen. I opened a transaction portal between my account and Stapleton’s. He transferred the sum he had promised without hesitation. He didn’t seem surprised that my own personal data was hidden from his view behind a privacy shroud.
“You know how and why my ship is so fast,” I said as I confirmed the transfer. “You understand the dangers involved.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I want my engineers to supervise the modifications and I want them checked out on all of the gear. I also want to know where we are headed before I agree to this.”
“Outback,” He said softly. “Out past the fringes. The edge of the world.”
# # #
I always tried to run with a minimal crew. It kept the profit margins high and the body count low. On this trip, I had seven with me. Hault, Brixxom and DeWhitte were my Fenir-born engineers. They were third generation chimeras, with enough cockroach DNA in them to handle the engines running hot for a good, long time. Pearson, McKinney and Khoa were my bridge crew. Africans have a well-deserved rep as great flight officers, y’know. And Layman, ah, sweet, bitchy, reliable, pain-in-my-ports, Layman was my first mate, the best sailor I ever met . . . and a good friend. We’d been in the service together.
We launched the following night. Stapleton had spent twenty-four hours tearing apart and putting back together the eyes and the ears of my ship before we lifted off.
“He knows his stuff,” Hault, my chief engineer, said. “I’ve checked over his shoulder and he’s telling you the truth, it’s all mono-edge sensor gear, never seen its like before. He’s got it all linked up to terminals in his cabin.”
“What is he looking for?” Layman said warily.
“Wouldn’t say,” I said. “Some kind of privately funded research.”
“And that’s why he’s chartering a hothouse ship?” she said. “Private research, my aft exhaust.”
“We’ll keep an eye on him,” I said, “and his gear. But for what he’s paying us, we all just got a hell of a lot closer to retirement.”
You ever been a hand on a starship before? Good. I assume you know about getting underway, then—the chaos, the excitement, and the nerves. We blasted off from Gostrum, her suns blazing behind us. We headed out-system at full N-Space burn. The Africans sang “Haye, Haye” while the ship shuddered from the thunder of the engines. The thrusters hissed and bumped as we adjusted course and slipped further and further away from the celestial fire and the cradle of a familiar world.
It took two days to reach the slide point and begin the calculations to transition into O-Space. Stapleton remained in his cabin, only leaving during the fire watch to eat a quick, silent meal in the galley. He left us alone, and we did the same.
On the third day, he appeared on the bridge, floating near the access hatch ladder. We were on final countdown to slide.
“I want to double-check the destination coordinates,” he said softly. It was the first words any of us had heard him say since we left Gostrum.
“You trying to tell me how to do my job?” Khoa said turning from the naviga
tion station to glare. The scientist didn’t even blink. He turned to address me.
“The arrival time and spatial alignment must be exact,” he said. “Otherwise, my experiment will fail.”
I nodded to Khoa, who mumbled an obscenity in Bantu and brought his data up on the central monitor. Stapleton pushed off from the hatch and drifted next to my command console. He scanned the glowing wall of formulas that hung over all of us. He reached forward and stopped the flow of data several times with the tap of a key, each time whispering to himself and nodding. Finally, he removed a palm-top from his pocket and compared the data. His hands were shaking.
“Good. Proceed,” he said after minutes of study.
“Do you want to take a Sedanol?” I asked him. “It can help a slide be a little less . . .”
“No,” he said interrupting. “I’ve traveled before. I understand what happens. Just slide, soon. Time is a major factor in my calculations.”
He drifted out of the chamber without another word.
“Well, he’s a treasure,” Layman said as she pulled down the nav-stats from the big screen and went back to analyzing the particle fan’s coolant temperature. “He did pay up front, right cap’n?”
“Oh yeah, and it wasn’t in play money either. I know he’s a pain in the arse, people, but let’s just take the walking bank account on a tour of scenic Nothing, call it a working vacation and then get back to work.”
The crossover went off without a hitch—well, as much as you can say that when you are folding yourself and a half-a-million tons of starship into eleven-dimensional origami.
There is that second, you know, that horrible second that stretches out in cold, silent uncertainty; that instant that makes you doubt there will be another one following it, makes you doubt formulas and reactors, proofs and laws. A single drop of unreasoning terror carries you a thousand light years in the flutter of a heartbeat. You never get used to it. Never get over it. I knew an old hand once that said he did. He walked out an air lock in his skivvies and laughed while his blood boiled and froze at the same time.
We re-entered N-space at the coordinates Stapleton had requested. About twenty-seven terrestrial days had passed while we had blinked and slid. I usually tried not to think too much about where we were or what we were for those twenty-seven days that the universe kept spinning along without us. We were well within the window of time he had stressed he needed to prepare for his experiments. He still had three days, so we all relaxed, powered down the generators that were slowly killing us and tried to stay out of his way.
It was near the end of the middle watch—about four in the morning—when I received a call from Pearson.
“Cap’n,” his rich leather voice murmured over the speaker, “Thought you’d want to know that Dr. Stapleton is beginning whatever it is he’s doing. He just requested we kill any non-essential systems and power-down the life support and generators for the next six hours.”
“All right, do it. But monitor everything he’s doing with the sensors and the communications array. I’ll be there in a second.”
I knew the air wasn’t stale yet, even with the main scrubbers and pumps silent, but I still felt claustrophobic. The ship was darker than usual; only dim red safety lights illuminating the narrow passages. It felt hotter, too. I knew it was my imagination playing with me, but sometimes, out in the Black, there’s not much dividing mind from meat.
I drifted onto the command deck. Pearson was at his post, an array of holo-monitors hanging before him like church windows of moving stained glass. Layman was there, too, in a University of Cygnus T-shirt so large it fell below her knees. She had a coffee bulb in her hand and was rubbing sleep out of her eyes. She handed me another bulb—it smelled like home and I gladly took it.
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
“Making me hate him,” Layman yawned. “He’s running almost seventy-five per cent of our power through those amplification relays he installed. With that kind of juice, he could read the power signature of a watch battery half a parsec away.”
Several alarms chirped for attention. Pearson silenced them with an eye-mouse glance at the hovering console. On the main screen, a white streak expanded quickly as it hurtled toward the ship.
“Is that a hyperwave transmission?” I said, squinting at the telemetry data. “Way the hell out here?”
As the graphic of the line overcame the ship’s position on the screen, like a bone-colored snake swallowing it, Stapleton’s recorders and amplifiers went wild.
“He’s got hold of it,” Pearson said. “He’s boosting his 4-D gain. Taking us up to ninety-eight per cent amplification.”
“Let him. Any idea where that signal came from?”
“There’s no one out this far in the Black,” Layman said. “A few Commonwealth expeditions, maybe a merchant explorer, a scout or two. Pretty much empty.”
More alarms, more frantic displays and chatter as the white line passed through us and headed deeper into the unexplored regions.
“Well?” I said, leaning over Pearson’s chair. “He get it?”
“Yeah, but from the looks of it, that signal is degraded pretty bad. He caught what he could of it. Looks like his gear is amplifying it, cleaning it up. Must have been traveling for a while to be unraveling so bad.”
“No boosting stations out this far to carry it along,” Layman said as she frowned at the data. “Just the big government amplifier ears out past the Bessel Reach. Trying to pick up any little green men that might be chatting out here.” She turned to me and I saw the light was dancing behind her eyes. “Come to think of it, Cap’n, this rig he’s got here is kind of like a portable version of what they use. A signal booster and enhancer.”
“Think he’s talking to aliens?’ Pearson said, half serious.
“Hell,” I said. “Everybody knows no self-respecting alien would talk to humanity. We’re all there is out here, Pearson. Anybody else left a long time ago and turned the lights off on their way out.”
Six hours later, Stapleton gave us the all-clear and we powered back up. Two hours after that, he asked me to come to his quarters.
The room was dark; it smelled of sweat and ozone. Almost every inch of the room was packed with tech: paper-thin holosheets—silent, babbling mosaics of hovering information; data obelisks—fireflies of red, green and blue dancing across their biolymer skin. A hammock and a few piles of dirty clothes were the only concessions to a human occupant in the room. The light was mostly coming from a large holographic array about the size of a coffee table. A shiver of frozen static was trapped above the array.
“I need to go further out,” he said as a greeting. He was hunched over the array, adjusting something with a tool wand. “I can feed the coordinates into the navigator’s station. We will need to leave in the next two hours if we are going to make it.”
I leaned against the edge of the hatch and crossed my arms. He finally noticed me.
“Of course I will increase the payment. Say, double?”
“When someone is that careless throwing money around they are either desperate or past caring. Which are you?”
“You know I’m good for it. You’ve seen my credit rating.”
“But—” I started.
He stood suddenly, throwing the wand across the compartment. It clattered into the darkness. “I don’t have time to debate this!”
“Make it!” I said. “Before we go any deeper in the Black, I want to know what you are doing and why.”
The frustration melted away. I took a really good look at Stapleton in the static’s glow. He was practically cadaverous. His coveralls were filthy and his eyes were ringed with the shadow of endless waking. He took a deep breath, glanced at the chronograph ticking down the seconds on one of the holosheets, and began.
“Are you familiar with Cornett Communications Amalgam?”
“CCA? Yeah. I’m alive, I’m breathing, and I’m not stranded on some asteroid with no uplink. Huge communications c
onglomerate. They own most of the Inner Core of the Commonwealth. They get paid every time someone watches a download.”
“A bit hyperbolic, but essentially correct. They wanted me to work for them after university, but Parsons-Ito-Ngumbe made me a better offer—head of their entire astrocommunications research division. You know, if I had not taken that job I would have been the one to . . .”
He stared out at something I couldn’t see. Finally, he blinked and went on.
“So, I didn’t work for CCA, Lise did. My wife, you see. I met her the day I interviewed with CCA. She was my—what did she call it? Human insurance. You see, Captain, people on the whole are no damned good. I have little use for them. Lise was different. She understood them. She laughed at silly things. She . . . I...You wouldn’t understand.”
I understood.
“What happened to her?”
He looked into that place again, the one I was not allowed to see.
“She died. She and her entire crew. They were part of a deep space probe expedition. The details are uncertain. Best guess is they miscalculated a variable star’s eruption pattern and it . . . irradiated them.”
That was as polite a way of putting it as any I had ever heard. I guess I wouldn’t want to say my wife was cooked from the inside out by gamma rays either.
“Eight months after they were past due,” he continued, “a New Luxor freighter caught part of a badly garbled hyperwave signal. They decrypted what they could and passed it along to the Core. Four months later, CCA declassified it and I finally found out what happened to Lise. At least in part.”
His fingers were pale, bony slivers stroking the painted, holographic air. The holosheet data swam, changed as the frozen oblivion twitching above the main display came to life. It howled with the death of supernovas and hissed with the omniscient indifference of hydrogen. It took a shape—a woman’s face. The features were mostly lost in the rain of interference.
“. . . ast record of the . . . pedition,” she said. “Unexpected burst of . . . diation. Primary system failed . . . ty per cent of crew is already dead . . . ife support is failing.”