“Nothing personal, child, not very personal, anyway. Fifteen years is just too long to go without relief. I must speak with my employers about that.”
He threw the bloody remnants of her clothing and accoutrements in on top of her. Then Woulf adjusted his clothing and stalked away as Bretta’s ignoble casket sealed itself, rolled down a rampway between a pair of canisters like it, and was automatically ejected through the Osprey’s otherwise impermeable §-field.
The Ceo’s misgivings, especially where Bretta was concerned, had proven too well justified. It would be, however, a long, agonizing time for those the unfortunate girl had left behind, before Lia came to know anything about it.
CHAPTER XXIII:
A CEO’S SECRET
“Bretta!”
Loreanna’s voice echoed unavailingly throughout the lower gundeck. Like others aboard the ship, she was beginning to grow hoarse with calling for her daughter. She betrayed herself by no outward manifestation of fear or grief, but Phoebus had noticed that her hands trembled, and she wrung incessantly at a handkerchief.
“Bretta Islay!” That voice would be Sedgeley’s, issuing from the mast well. He had surprised his niece—and Krumm, in the bargain—by knowing his way round a starship very handily. Perhaps he had been a yachtsman in his youth.
It was the Osprey’s youngest officers who had first missed Bretta at the “morning” meal. She was the sort of individual who would be missed. Her family and traveling companions had next assured themselves that she had not merely overslept—an idea the girl would have regarded as insulting had she known of it—but no amount of shouting throughout the ship had elicited a response.
Acting quickly, Arran and Phoebus conducted a more and more frantically fear-driven search of the whole vessel. The captain’s hands trembled as well, more from rage, Phoebus suspected, than anything else. What he was apparently looking for now was an object for his burgeoning anger. Before beginning to search this morning, he had strapped upon his forearms both of the outsized Oplyte’s thrustibles he had worn through the late war. Phoebus, too, carried one such. He had experience of boats’ projectibles that boasted of less power.
Most of their effort this day had been wasted before it had been spent. With better than fifteenscore of diligent crew members conducting their search tier by tier, deck by deck, in every recess and locker of a starship they all knew blindfolded, it soon became obvious that no trace of any kind remained of the girl. Arran’s response—twice—was to set them searching all over again. At the end of it, even those who loved her best had no choice other than to assume that their worst fears upon her account had somehow come to pass.
Not knowing for certain was by far the worst of it. Phoebus suspected this was only the beginning, that it would continue to be so for years to come.
“The poor darling must have been wandering about the all-but-deserted vessel during the sparsely peopled nightwatch,” Tula Krumm theorized for the benefit of her husband. Hanoverian was not her native language (although she had been speaking it almost exclusively for more than twenty years) and her pronouncements in it tended to be a trifle stilted, for all that they were sincere.
She touched Loreanna upon the arm.
Tillie (whose own command of the official Monopolitan tongue was little better) nodded sadly. “That appears to have been her habit of late. A girl-child of this particular age requires her privacy and freedom. I certainly did. Why, I remember my own adolescence as if it had been only yesterday.”
Their husband agreed reluctantly. By now he had started to worry more about the girl’s mother and father than about the girl herself. Something inside him, something he did not like very much, was starting to give Bretta up for dead. It was a terrible, nauseating feeling he seemed to have no control over. “An’ in the darkness of the maindeck—unbelievable as it may seem—she must somehow have lost her footing an’ tumbled into the lethal §-field.”
Phoebus Krumm was well acquainted with that danger. For many years, as an officer aboard the carrack Gyrfalcon—where he had first met a very bright but badly frightened young stowaway who had signed himself into the ship’s complement as “Henry Martyn”—it had been one of his duties to instruct newly pressganged sailors in that danger. It was the first thing every crew member learned. The possibility of such an accident as this had not, however, been made clear to this lot of passengers. Krumm would have felt guiltier, but the fact was that upon shipboard, Bretta knew what she was about.
“We have been through the entire vessel three times,” he told his wives, although his words were actually addressed to Loreanna. In his decades upon the Deep, he had lost many a comrade to accident, disease, and war, but could not remember feeling worse about it than he did at this particular moment. For fifteen years he had loved Arran and Loreanna as if they were the very children he had never been able to beget. He had watched their glorious Bretta growing up, and it was all that he could do to keep himself from breaking down in the deep, lugubrious sobs that were customary to his people. “Let us betake ourselves up to the maindeck, an’ see what our poor captain would have of us now.”
For most of the morning, Woulf made a show of helping crew and passengers search for poor, lost Bretta. Those aboard the Osprey did not suspect him of having harmed her and cast her overboard, and they would not—until he had an opportunity to gloat about it. It was an opportunity he looked forward to. For the moment, he had retired to a place of hiding he had prepared by breaking into one of the steam launches upon the boatdeck, in order to take stock.
Out of habit vastly longer than any one of these mere mortals all around him might have imagined possible, he squatted with his knife in one hand and a hone set in the other, touching up the edges of his fighting blade. He was always happy when he could combine business with pleasure, and last night he had accomplished both most handily. In one stroke—so to speak—he had dealt a mortal blow to the morale of this insane expedition, while at the same time, consuming one of the most delectable morsels that had ever come his way.
How old had she been? Fifteen, was it? Certainly no record there. He’d had them a deal younger than that, over the past nine hundred years. But still, none sweeter.
He wondered, idly, how the others might react, did they know the truth about him, but he did not care. There was too much truth about him for little minds like that to absorb all at once, anyway. Learning it—or even merely the truth about his age—might easily have killed them where they stood.
He laughed at the thought.
It amused him to think that Loreanna—speaking of delectable morsels—could not guess that he was not her younger half brother, not Jennivere’s son, after all, but, in fact, the most professional assassin the universe had ever known, energetically working for her enemies. He was also nine-tenths of a millennium older than she, preserved by his keepers for the great majority of his existence in a form of electronic stasis unknown to the remainder of the galaxy.
He had begun his career nearly nine centuries ago—he enjoyed thinking of himself as an “uncivil servant”—in the employ of a secret government agency, the very existence of which had been forbidden by the highest laws of the ancient nation-state that had created it. And him. And now, from time to time, he was revived and began to live again, but only when his services were required.
The Osprey was within range of the stellar system where men were forced to become Oplytes. His own mission nearly over, now, he was upon his way home. This time, he had been awakened and dispatched to assess the threat represented by the Monopolity of Hanover’s new Ceo, Lia Woodgate Wheeler. For one thing, she had publicly denounced the Trade upon one too many an occasion for the taste of those he served.
He was also to look over her predicted ally, the infamous sky-robber Henry Martyn. Fifteen years before, that one had been famous for granting freedom to slaves of all sorts. Although such an emancipation was impossible for Oplytes, it clearly established Henry Martyn’s attitude, and demonstrated t
hat he was just as great a threat as the new Ceo. It had also created a highly undesirable precedent which must be discouraged at all costs. In the end, Woulf would have to decide the best course, and kill one or both of them if necessary.
An earlier, more subtle attempt, which his employers had believed wonderfully clever—at destroying the warrior with guilt—apparently had failed.
But Woulf knew now that it was he who had miscalculated, owing to the internal biases of the culture of which he was now a part. For all of their baroque trappings and byzantine relation-ships, these were simpler times than those he had been born into. He tended to make things more complicated than they need be. Arran was all but crippled by his guilt—he simply bore it well.
Yet, in another respect, Woulf was like many another subject of the several imperia-conglomerate. Without being aware of it, he had come to believe that no mere woman could control the destiny of an interstellar empire. Instead, he had calculated that her father’s abdication must have been some kind of ruse. Thus, rather than simply killing Lia or Arran as his employers wished, he had “reasoned” that the cleverest way was to follow Brother Leo and observe him.
More cleverness—and another failure.
There were reasons why Woulf felt a considerable distance from—if not an actual superiority to—those who foolishly believed they controlled him, and often substituted his own tactical judgment of affairs for their orders. For one thing, he had managed to remain completely human over the centuries—as human as he had been to begin with—while they and their successors had not.
For another, they were unaccustomed to extending their own lives by the same process that had been used to extend his. The very notion of attempting such a thing—on the rare occasions it arose—appeared to terrify them. It was their habit to employ him, whenever they deemed it necessary, and then to pass him on as a kind of grisly heirloom, to another horrible generation. To them, he had become a mysterious and powerful being no fewer than nine centuries old. And yet, he knew (and knew that his keepers knew, as well) that he had only lived through—and learned from—fewer than thirty of those years.
They tended to forget that he was not an organic robot like the Oplytes they produced. For reasons that always seemed good to him at the time, he would do things upon his own. They could never have predicted that he would risk everything, seeking a moment’s animal pleasure with young Bretta, and then murdering her afterward. Nor, because they did not understand a species they no longer belonged to, would they have believed he had done it for reasons of his own devising more complicated than the pleasure he had seen as a fringe benefit.
The simple fact was that Woulf—even by his own estimate—was allowed far too much latitude of judgment by his operators, although there was hardly any alternative. What set him apart, if nothing else did, was the fact that he was the only individual in the Known Universe who remembered humanity’s homeworld.
He had been a covert agent there, trained by one of the powerful nation-states that had controlled the planet. Ultimately, he had been assigned to a community, shared by several nations, based upon the homeworld’s large natural satellite.
It was this, of course, that had saved his life, while the people who had “created” him had perished. All life upon the homeworld had been obliterated by a hostile exchange of thermonuclear devices. Upon the moon, they had watched in horror as their home planet had enveloped itself in radioactive clouds.
A few thousand scientists, technicians, and workers, living in a colony specifically established to develop a faster-than-light starship were the only survivors.
And Woulf.
Not only was everything they had ever known and loved now dead and beyond reach, they were marooned for the rest of their lives upon a lifeless ball of rock.
“I fail,” complained Demondion-Echeverria, pausing to take a whiff from the ornate narcohaler he had resumed using upon being forced to leave his beloved Immortal School, “to comprehend this lethality business everybody has been babbling about.” This fellow knew much, Phoebus realized, but precious little about starships—or parents confronted with the death of their eldest child.
Upon bales and bollards, they sat in a circle upon the maindeck, outside the captain’s quarters. It was better than being cooped up inside. Here they could feel that they were outdoors, although the §-field made a haggis of the sky.
Phoebus sat upon a great cleat, massive forearms resting upon his knees, fumbling with a large blue Skyan marshmelon he had not yet decided whether to eat. (Sedgeley’s position was similar, face buried in his hands; it was clear that the old rogue had adored his great-niece; perhaps he was only discovering it now.) Phoebus had missed both breakfast and lunch, and still had little appetite.
Glancing uncertainly at Loreanna, who nodded a brave affirmative, he took a breath, and addressed the former ambassador. “Ye know, Mister Demondion-Echeverria, do ye not, that a subtle but powerful energy field, which forms the technological basis for all Deep-travel, an’ other applications besides, like thrustibles an’ projectibles, surrounds this here vessel an’ renders her inertialess?”
The fellow sniffed delicately. The motions he made were languid, owing to the drug, but his eyes were as clear as his elocution. “I had heard some such.”
“Well,” Phoebus told him, “it is only in such an ‘insubstantial’ state of existence that the Osprey an’ other starships like her may be driven before the otherwise trivial tachyon currents of the Great Deep, an’ may by this means attain velocities greatly exceeding the otherwise limiting speed of light.”
“Why, yes, yes. It all comes back to me now.”
Phoebus gave the man a look, but he had apparently meant what he said without sarcasm. “At the same time, the §-field forms a protective bubble about a ship, retainin’ warmth an’ atmosphere, so hundreds of crewbeings may live an’ work upon an open deck, no hull to enclose them—in what was once called a ‘shirtsleeve environment’—unencumbered by special garments of any kind.”
Demondion-Echeverria nodded uncertainly. He was by no means stupid, but had found no reason before now to know these things and probably intended to forget them again as soon as possible. “I believe I follow you, Captain Krumm. Pray continue.”
“Good on you, Mister Demondion-Echeverria.” He glanced at the Islays, rigidly in control of themselves. “What me wife Tula says must have happened to Bretta—indeed, what all yer companions with knowledge of ships have had uppermost in their minds—is a common shipboard accident at the best of times.”
Arran closed his eyes a moment, then inhaled and straightened himself.
“I am afraid I still do not understand.” Demondion-Echeverria began to take a whiff upon his inhaler, but forgot it with Krumm’s next words—and actions.
“Then consider this.”
Of a sudden, Phoebus caught everyone’s attention by hurling the melon high over the quarterdeck, past the taffrail, and out into the surrealistic §-field. As it struck, they witnessed a loud report and the dazzling flash of §-field annihilation. The melon had been converted instantaneously into energy.
“Her slender body would have disintegrated, without pain, in less than a second.” Phoebus knew the thought would fail to comfort a mother and father who wanted their daughter back more than anything else. Each was likely taking inventory of every time they had denied her something or spoken to her crossly.
“What an abominable waste,” replied Demondion-Echeverria, earning him a look from Loreanna that would have had a more observant man watching over his shoulder the rest of his life. Arran’s face assumed a dangerous expression.
“You are absolutely certain, then, that this is what happened to Mistress Islay?”
Phoebus sighed again. “Not at all. I am not bloody certain of bloody anything. But it must have happened to her. The only other way t’get off a starship upon the face of the Deep is through her launch ports or her garbage system.”
At that moment, Woulf stepped
out upon the deck.
The ambassador’s raised eyebrows represented another question, which Arran, standing beside his wife with one hand lying upon her shoulder, decided to answer. Phoebus was very glad to hear him speak up. The captain had not uttered more than three words all morning long, and they had been, “Search it again!”
“You see, although small masses such as Krumm’s marshmelon may be tossed out with impunity, large masses—a starship’s daily accumulation of garbage—may not, as it engenders unwanted fluctuations in the §-field. Yet, it must be gotten rid of, or we should be even more crowded together than we are now.”
Phoebus nodded. “Some older vessels handle the problem with a system that pulverizes and disposes of small quantities of refuse every minute, day an’ night. Others, Osprey fer example, do it all at once, usin’ disposable insulated canisters, capable of creatin’ momentary lacunae—holes—in the §-field.”
“I have seen these canisters myself,” Woulf volunteered, “when . . . when Bretta showed them to me, upon a tour of the ship.” He cast his eyes down sadly.
Jennivere, who had said nothing, was aghast. “Is this not . . . messy? Do we not litter the Deep? We cannot simply throw things away, there is no away!”
Krumm headed Arran off. “Madame, ‘away’ is all there is. When infinity begins t’fill up, let me know an’ I will stop. Meanwhile, if there is no away, where in the Ceo’s name will ye go when I tell ye yer opinions are not solicited?”
“Phoebus—” Loreanna warned him, as Woulf gave him a dark, hostile glare. The stress upon everyone had apparently begun to tell, even the mighty Krumm.
“Still . . .” Arran and Loreanna had remained relatively calm, refusing to accept the idea that their graceful, intelligent daughter could have been so clumsy and stupid as to perish in such an ignominious manner. “I would point out that for Tula’s theory to have merit, Bretta would have had to fall upward, over the waisthigh quarterdeck taffrail, something I find utterly unthinkable.”
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