While the maindeck lay completely open to the Deep, protected only by the §-field which, in addition to making the act of starsailing possible, allowed mast, spars, and sails to be worked by crewbeings attired for a “shirtsleeve” environment, there were lower decks meant for cargo, passengers, and a formidable array of projectibles bearing much the same relationship to thrustibles that cannon did to pistols. Under an ancient starsailing tradition that even Arran could not persuade them to abandon, Osprey’s crew expected to sleep wherever they might, about the heavy bases of the projectile mounts—or caliprettes—upon the gundeck, even between cargo bales. Finally, at the lowest, most aftward, extremity of the bucket, lay the liftdeck, housing the lubberlift and its many tens of thousands of klommes of almost preternaturally strong cabelle.
All about the open maindeck stood the bucket’s rim, consisting of the captain’s accommodations and those customarily allotted to his officers and important passengers. The roof of this super-structure became the quarterdeck, itself rimmed by a stout taffrail (to prevent her crewbeings from falling into the instantaneously lethal §-field) from which the starship was navigated and commanded. Here, too, were foundations for most of the vessel’s standing and running rigging. Upon the largest vessels—Osprey was not among these—there might be a secondary level of luxury quarters and another open deck, or poop.
Loreanna joined her daughter at the mullioned window, placing a hand upon her shoulder and stretching upon tiptoe to peer downward, which, owing to the unique geometry and architecture of an interstellar sailing vessel, was the same as aftward. Softly illuminated by the scene they attempted to observe below, her face shone with excitement, as if she were a girl her daughter’s age.
Had they but turned round and crossed the room they presently occupied, Bretta and Loreanna might have looked out through similar windows, including those set in a pair of “hatches,” as Bretta had learned long ago they were properly termed (although to her, they looked like ordinary doors, just as most of the Osprey’s, “ladders” looked like ordinary stairs) onto the busy maindeck with its astonishing tangle of sheets, lines, and cabelles. There, hundreds of barefooted crewbeings scurried to and fro to do their captain’s bidding.
Overhead, through the broad skylights, they might even have watched more of the crew, high aloft, standing upon the footcabelle and clinging to the spars. At the moment, they were taking in the ship’s enormous equilaterally triangular sails, three to a tier—port, starboard, and dorsal or ventral—and the more scalene and numerous staysails spiraling fore and aft, from tier to tier.
Had Bretta been taking what she still thought of as her rightful part in things, it would have been another matter altogether, but this was simply another variation upon the processes she had been compelled to watch from a distance many times over the past several weeks, and it was not the view that either of the Islay women wished to see today. For the first time in her life, Bretta had an opportunity to observe a planet other than that upon which she had been born.
The breathtaking spectacle, aft and below, of the cloud-wrapped, gloomy surface of Hanover, was almost, she thought, almost worth the two months and seven days she and her mother—but not all four of her sisters, who had remained home upon Skye with their little brother, in every case under tearful protest—had spent cooped up, for the most part, within these beautiful and comfortable but closely crowded quarters, traveling among the countless stars of the Monopolity in order to arrive here, just off the world that ruled them all.
Those seeing it from forty-odd thousand klommes above its surface, here in orbit, enjoyed something of an aesthetic advantage over those unfortunates who had to endure the demoralizing behavior of its atmosphere. (It had been said, upon more than one occasion, that Hanoverians sailed out to conquer an empire because they could not bear the weather at home.) Yet, through the all but eternal cloud cover which kept Hanoverian skies overcast most days of its extralong year, billions upon billions of lamplights brightening the planetwide city below made the world glow from pole to pole like a giant, pulsing jewel.
Bretta and her mother had not been advised as to how long it would be yet before they all boarded the lubberlift for the endless journey to the surface. Having endured the two-and-one-half-hour ride upon more than one occasion back home, she did not look forward to it very much. She would play cards with her mother, she supposed, or read, not being the sort to take a nap. Starships of her era and civilization never landed, being much too fragile of construction to maintain physical integrity within the gravity well of even a small planet. Instead, they placed themselves in orbit above a world at such a velocity, and in such a location, that they stood above one point upon the equator at all times.
From this so-called “synchronous” or “stationary” orbit, a starship’s crew lowered to the surface a cabelle of fabulous strength—invented in the days when scientists and engineers were more curious and competent than lately—which crews upon the ground then fastened to gigantic bollards constructed for the purpose. It was upon this cabelle that the lubberlift traveled at velocities beginning with a slow walk, but gradually rising to about twenty-nine thousand klommes per hour. At no time did passengers experience any but the feeblest pressure of acceleration.
Failing this—if, for instance, the planet in question were previously undiscovered, unexplored, or unsettled—fusion-powered steam launches could be dispatched to its surface, assigned the task of building a proper mooring for their mother vessel. Upon occasion, owing to severe weather, hostile indigines, or reasons not afterward discovered, the launches never came back, and even when they did, Arran hated using his, as all starsailing captains did, because they consumed water, which could not be regenerated in transit. He was perhaps the first, however, to have put them to an effective use in combat.
Bretta knew that it was here, in orbit about Hanover, that they expected to rendezvous with Phoebus Krumm and his pair of small, plump wives, Tula and Tillie—provided, of course, that Arran’s former first officer had received the Ceo’s message wherever he had been and felt like heeding it. He was well capable of ignoring it, Ceo be damned, and if he did make his appearance here, it would be mainly to visit with the Islay family and to serve Bretta’s father as he always had. She had known him well, all of her life, and loved him even better, thanks to his many welcome visits to the Islay home upon moonringed Skye.
Bretta, an oval hoop of embroidery still clutched (albeit entirely forgotten) in her hand, glanced over at her mother, straining, exactly as she was herself, to peer down through the many-paned windows of what presently served them as their sitting room. Bretta’s father, she knew, was somewhere out upon the maindeck, or perhaps even aloft, commanding his well-drilled crew (and how she longed to be among them!) as they made ready to bring the Hanoverian pilot aboard.
Before Bretta’s family could disembark, this highly talented and worthy individual, in his turn, would skillfully order all of the necessary maneuvers to bring Captain Arran Islay’s splendid old “armed freighter” into the exact orbital position already assigned her by the Hanoverian Port Captain. As an Autonomous Drector-Hereditary, her father had diplomatic immunity, and, in consequence, there would be no quarantine or customs inspection. Thus far, no mention had been made of any kind, at any level of officialdom, with regard to the starship Osprey’s genuine identity as a captured fighting vessel, heavily weaponed, or of her genuine master, the notorious world-pillager Henry Martyn.
How ironic, Bretta thought, that this otherwise well-traveled brigand had never before had an occasion to behold at first hand this ultimate center of human civilization and the Known Galaxy. Nor had he ever, to her knowledge, evinced much of an interest in doing so. Although his principal adversaries had commanded their forces from here, his own struggles and concerns had been upon the edges of Hanover’s broad domain. His wife Loreanna, however, had been born in the city below some twenty-nine years ago, within a stone’s throw of the ’Droom itself.
&n
bsp; Bretta regarded her mother almost afresh. This was one of those pivotal moments, she realized, that they would both remember vividly for the remainder of their lives. Petite, auburnhaired, and, her daughter admitted, more than amply freckled (what did men see in all these damned freckles, anyway?), by all accounts, and from every likeness she had seen, Loreanna had only grown more beautiful, to her husband and to everybody else, over the fifteen years since, as a girl even younger than Bretta, she had last had sight of her native world.
Now Loreanna had returned to the capital world with her husband and her daughter to become acquainted (among a good many other reasons) with a mother whom she had never hoped to know. Many of those “principal adversaries” Henry Martyn had eventually defeated so ignominiously would be here, as well—this time, theoretically, as his allies. If Bretta had informed her mother of what she thought of that particular arrangement, Loreanna would have agreed, with a grin, but would have informed her daughter that she was too young to be so cynical.
Deep in her heart, Loreanna had long since forgiven her uncle Sedgeley Daimler-Wilkinson for the more than significant role he had played in her past misfortunes and her husband’s. She would be most interested, Bretta had overheard her mother confess to her father, to see whether she was morally or emotionally capable of admitting this to the old villain, face-to-face. Upon one hand, he had sent her off into exile for refusing to be a commodity; upon another, he had been responsible for her having met Arran; upon a third, he had not known that, and would surely have interfered, had he been capable. She did look forward to seeing him for the first time in more than a decade and a half.
Turning to ask a question about her great uncle and his activities since then, suddenly, for the first time since Loreanna had hurried in from the next room at her daughter’s excited shouting, Bretta realized what her mother was wearing. A pang of—what?—disappointment, embarrassment, certainly not envy passed through her, and for once she was at a loss as to what to say next.
“Mother . . .”
At least, being an as yet unspoken-for female of not quite marriageable age, Bretta was not required by the humiliating dictates of fashion to affect the—what were the stupid things called?—the emzeebees she saw now upon her mother’s arms and the ridiculous clothing that went with them. (In any case, she had always thought it was supposed to be the other way around with accessories.) Emzeebees were the allegedly decorative physical restraints for upper-class women, which of late had somehow come into fashion upon the capital world.
“Yes, dear, what is it?”
“Slithered into fashion” would most likely have been a more appropriate expression, Bretta thought resentfully. It seemed more than a little ironic to her—in plain truth, it was so embarrassing that she could scarcely bear the sensation of the thing—that in an indirect way, her own famous freedom-fighting father and mother had been generally credited by the Hanoverian mass media for having been responsible for this most recent, egregiously slavish fad.
For in a broad way, the fashion upon Hanover had shifted sometime in the past decade from an overly elaborate foppishness of fabric, cut, and manner, to an affected Deep-raider’s style for men. Whatever it was that historically ignorant fashion designers happened to believe such “buckle-swashers” had worn over the past fifteen hundred years or so, was apparently being affected this very day upon the streets and in the offices and meeting chambers of the capital world. And yet fashion, as everybody knew, was not really about men at all. Among married women or the betrothed, it was the studied, ragged finery and glittering fetters of a sexually suggestive captivity that had currently become all the rage.
For practical purposes (as practical as fashionability here or elsewhere ever became) these fetters consisted, in the main, of mirror-polished metal bands no less than a couple of siemmes wide, fastened about the bare arms just above the elbows, and connected to one another by a light, faceted metal chain passing across an attractively naked female back. Naturally, the more extreme the statement being made, the broader the bands became and the shorter and heavier the chain. The truly dedicated sometimes added matching wrist-cuffs and chains that passed across the bare midriff, a “belly chain” about the waist, or even ankle-fetters, for the very latest word in “helpless” feminine captivity and compliance.
“Emzeebees.” Bretta wondered where the name had come from, and whether it referred to the style in general, or just the chains. At least it had nothing to do with her family, she thought. She had been utterly scandalized to see her own mother adopt this new and foolish fashion without a minute’s visible hesitation. Somehow, the otherwise observant girl had managed to miss the glances, grins, and innuendo, between her parents, of a second honeymoon. On the other hand, they were not for her, and she had never been meant to see them.
“Excuse me, dear, what did you say?”
“Nothing, Mother. Never mind.”
Loreanna, after all, had once been a real Deep-raider’s captive, sexual and otherwise, and her buckle-swashing husband a genuine brigand of the Deep. It was a certain limited public awareness of these facts which had apparently created the basis for this idiotic fashion. If Bretta had only overcome her emotions for a moment and thought about it, she would have realized (in fact, she would have remembered) that her parents were perfectly capable of swimming against the current of fashion whenever they saw some good reason to. It was just that, at this particular moment, they saw no good reason to, and if the truth be told, were rather enjoying themselves, and each other, by means of it.
Abruptly, a brief flash of reflected sunlight caused the two of them to glance upward instead of down. As they did, they saw through the space once occupied by the ventral mizzensail—and descending upon them like the bird of prey their own vessel had been named for—a tiny, hurtling shape without sails, constructed of the same metalloid mesh from which the Osprey had been fashioned.
It was a fusion-powered steam launch, but not one of the Osprey’s, as Bretta could tell immediately, not only from its size and shape—noticeably different from the auxiliary vessels she was most accustomed to—but from the profligate manner in which its operator tumbled it upon its longest axis and braked abruptly, wasting uncountable leets of precious water. This, then, she supposed, must be the Hanoverian pilot arriving. Having an entire planetful of water below him, at the end of a handy lubberlift cabelle, the fellow would grow to feel that he had reaction mass to waste. And he was doing precisely that.
Bretta wondered momentarily about the peculiar direction from which the steam launch had arrived—based upon experience, her expectation would have been to see the pilot boat approach their vessel laterally, instead of from overhead, or forward—and commented upon it to her mother. It was only with some difficulty that Loreanna tore her attention away from the great spectacle outside.
“Is it possible that neither your father nor I explained this to you, my dear?”
Bretta shrugged.
Loreanna shook her head, attempting to watch what was occurring through the window while answering her daughter’s question. She was not making a good job of either. This was not the first time Bretta had seen her so distracted over the past several weeks. Upon the other hand, the girl calculated, it had to be the very definition of distraction to be returning home, after some fifteen years, to a mother one had never known and a half brother one never even knew existed.
In a somewhat shorter time than either of them had expected, they felt a solid bump! transmitted through the starship’s metalloid fabric. Apparently the pilot launch had docked in one of the launch bays of the boatdeck two levels below.
“You have such a good memory,” Loreanna was continuing, “I am certain you would remember if we had mentioned it. The disembarkation procedure in orbit about Hanover is considerably different, here where they have so much daily commerce, from those at frontier ports of call more familiar to you. Although I have been informed upon the very best of authority—your own father, to be prec
ise—that they follow quite similar practices upon the Jendyne capital planet.”
This was not the first instance of late in which Bretta had found herself left out of matters and affairs to which she might have ordinarily expected to be admitted. The most painful example was her unexplained confinement within these very quarters. Although before this voyage, it had by no means been a daily occurrence, Bretta could not count the number of times she had helped to work this ship, in any one of hundreds of capacities, almost as if she had not been born the daughter of the vessel’s master, but just a common able-bodied crewbeing.
Why her father had suddenly decreed, upon this first occasion that they were actually sailing somewhere, that she must remain a useless passenger—a “beast” in common sailor’s parlance—she could not say, nor would he. For some reason, it had never occurred to Bretta to discuss this with her mother; she had decided to endure stoically this unjust, arbitrary punishment to which she had been sentenced. She dared not press the matter with Arran, not out of fear of his anger but out of fear of her own. Simply thinking of her unhappy situation now had brought her close to tears which she refused to show anyone.
“Lay-deez!”
Of a sudden, her bleak thoughts were interrupted—nor would they resume again for some while—by sight of a gigantic and familiar figure throwing wide both doors of their little sitting room and spreading his arms wide. As she had done all her life, she flung herself into the giant’s embrace without an instant’s hesitation, burying her face in his great curly beard as he made oofing sounds and exclaimed about how much she had grown since he had seen her last.
Behind were two fat little women and her father, beaming as if it were a holiday.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 15