The City and the Ship

by Anne McCaffrey

  "In other words, off with our heads, if they could reach mine."

  "And us running as fast as we can to stay in one place, too. Which capability you also don't have. Now, since this is my first time with you . . ."

  "Oh, Channa . . . pant, pant."

  "Simeon," she said warningly. "I know where the controls for your hormone balance are."

  "Heh heh, sorry. What's the worst they can do to me? Send me back to asteroidic purgatory? Like I told you, I'm only on temporary duty here anyway."

  Channa had been running a scan. "There are twelve entries for the word 'stuff'! You want this to be a temporary assignment? Well, you may get your wish."

  "It's not a wish, my dear, I never said 'I wish they'd take me away from here and put me anywhere else.' I've a very definite destination in mind, as you so astutely concluded the other evening. If I had my druthers, I'd be running a command ship and waging star wars on the Axial Perimeter. But," and he gave a huge audible sigh, "who believes in wishes anymore?"

  "You do, with all your war games and tactical daydreams."

  The approaching ship still had not responded, nor was it dumping speed as fast as it should. In fact, whoever was in command had waited much too long to begin doing so. The flare of drive energies should be blanking out that whole quadrant, and the neutrino flux was barely enough for a pile just ticking over. Simeon came to a disagreeable conclusion.

  "Whoa, there, Channa. We've got stuff, not mine, coming in to make mince of us if we're not careful. Have a look?"

  Simeon slapped up a main screen view of the intruder bearing down on them. Surprise and alarm held her motionless for only a split second before she reacted.

  "I'm alerting the perimeter guard," she said, wiping her previous program and inputting the new.

  "Right!" Although he already had, two sources of the same alert emphasized the emergency. "I'm busy calculating how to cushion the impact of that great hulking mass whistling towards us. I hope they know where the brakes are." Nice to have a brawn to share emergency work. The station personnel should get used to dealing with her.

  Stabbing the alert button on the main console, Channa then called up a finer resolution of the object, which to her appeared to be a darker mass against the black of space.

  "Unannounced arrival!" She transmitted the image to the personnel on perimeter traffic control, alerting them to the pertinent vector and ordering them to begin rerouting incoming traffic.

  "How do you know it's whistling toward us?" she asked in as calm a voice as he was using while her fingers flew over the controls. "There's no sound in space."

  Simeon could detect just a micro-tremor of fear in her noncommittal tone. "If I think it whistles," he answered, "it whistles."

  "Perimeter says it's like nothing they've ever seen before either and—" she paused and licked her lips "—it's about to cut a broad swath through the proper traffic pattern."

  Simeon took full control of the traffic control boards. He could see and respond to the necessary changes in traffic patterns faster than any unshelled human. He was simultaneously redirecting and responding to dozens of ships.

  Suddenly Channa started cursing. "Damn their eyes and innards! These damned civilians are asking questions instead of doing what they're supposed to in emergency routines. Now you see why I didn't like you calling those false alarms. No one's paying a blind bit of attention to this genuine emergency! Wolf-cryer!"

  "I've put it on every public screen. They'll know it's no drill," Simeon said, his voice velvet with malice, "and it's coming straight at us. I don't think it'll stop."

  I didn't realize you could banter when you're terrified, he thought with tight control, though it helped being able to set your analogue of adrenal glands.

  Channa stared, stunned, as the screen filled with the alien ship. "You haven't activated the repel screen? Hit it for God's sake!" She pressed her rocker switch just a fraction of a second behind Simeon.

  * * *

  Joat gritted her teeth and wiped eyes and nose on the back of her sleeve. It was a good shirt, and clean. Dumb, she told herself fiercely. Dumb, dumb, dumb bitch, dumb gash, just like the captain told you you were. Especially when he was drunk. He'd always been worse then.

  She turned her attention back to the little computer. It was the best she'd ever been able to steal, a real Spuglish; jacked into the station system right now, with the skipper-unit she'd cobbled up to keep the station from knowing just where or why.

  Ship schedules / departures / outsystem, she told it. Machines didn't lie to you! You could trust machines and, if they didn't do what they were supposed to, it wasn't because they had lied. Maths and machinery could be believed.

  A barking sob broke through her lips, spattering drops on the screen. She bit down on her hand until the pain and the taste of her own blood let her continue. Then she wiped the machine down with the tail of her shirt. Machines didn't let you down, either.

  Departures, the computer said. Look, Joat, you don't have to leave here. Trust me, we're—

  "No!" she screamed.

  Joat stuffed the scramblers into her pockets and went off down the duct at a scrambling crawl, ignoring projections and brackets that only slightly impeded her progress. The motions were reflexive, with a graceless efficiency.

  Nobody's going to give me away again, she thought. Get me used to eating regular and school and everything, then give me away! The thought went round and round in her head, filling it, so that it was minutes before the klaxon penetrated her self-absorption.

  "Oh, shit," she whispered in a still small voice, listening. Then she turned and went back the way she came, faster still. The computer was back there, and without it, she wouldn't be able to find out what was really going on.

  Her spacesuit was there, too. This sounded serious.

  * * *

  "THIS IS NO DRILL! REPEAT, THIS IS NO DRILL!" The words rang down the corridors and hallspaces, without the melodramatic klaxons Simeon had always used. "Nonessential personnel report to secure areas. Report to secure areas. Prepare for breach of hull integrity."

  This time the citizens of the SSS-900-C listened, hastening into suits, gathering children and pets and heading for the central core or section shelters. Crews pelted onto their ships, even as moorings were detached and entry locks irised shut and each "all on board" signal was relayed to Simeon. Emergency crews flocked to their assigned stations. Infirmary patients who could not be moved were placed in individual, independently powered life-support units. All too soon, most of the citizens of SSS-900-C could only wait, imagining their station crushed like an egg as the invader plowed into them.

  Simeon worked frantically, ordering ships of all sizes out of the projected path of the incoming ship, brutally suppressing the knowledge that ships with ordinary, unshelled pilots could barely handle the split second timing he was asking of them. So far, so good—no one out there seemed destined to die today. For a heart-stopping moment he thought the alien might be decelerating, but the blaze of energies sputtered and died. It's only shed 7% of relative velocity, he calculated dismally. Not nearly enough.

  "Why didn't they program mobility?"

  "Who?" Channa asked distractedly. "Where?"

  "In me! In this station! I can't duck! I've no weaponry to blast it out of my way. I can't even fend off such mass. All I can do is watch. What lasers I've got can just about handle a decent-sized meteor. The best I can do is warm up his hull a little, and I have to wait till he's up my ass to do it! Damn! This station is like a paraplegic spaceship!"

  "Whoa! Did you see that?" Channa shouted. The mass had seemed to deliberately veer aside from an ordinary asteroid miner vessel, something the miner pilot himself probably couldn't have done. "Watch," she said, "there! Did you see? It jigged just a bit to miss that incoming ferry traffic. It is being guided."

  "But by what?" Simeon asked. He ran calculations on the ballistics of those maneuvers. The deviations were absolutely minimal for the effect. "It
's traveling so fast now, no human pilot could stop it and stay conscious. They don't answer any radio messages. They're ignoring the damn warning flares. Shit, maybe they think we're welcoming them. Ah, good!"

  "But they are decelerating again, Simeon," Channa said, glancing up from her own screens to the main viewer before she went back to other chores which she had assumed.

  "Yeah, marginally longer this time. No, cutting out—no, decelerating again. Rate of energy-release . . . God, but they're still not dumping enough velocity! And still on a collision course!" His voice went slightly wild. "They must want to destroy me!"

  "I don't see any weapons," Channa said, trying to finish her current task in time.

  "Who can tell in that jumble of struts and boxes and crap! Besides, that thing itself is a weapon." Simeon had just one card to play and at exactly the right moment for maximum effect. "You're not even suited up, partner. At least take shelter in my shaft core, Channa."

  She shook her head, "Not till I'm through evacuating the alien quadrant. 'Sides, those Letheans scare easily enough as it is without me appearing in full gear."

  She had managed at last to get through to the leader of the Lethe contingent. A people so formal that emergencies required a ceremony, mercifully brief, for deferring the usual endless courtesies in favor of survival. Had Channa not performed the ceremony and explained the situation to them, they would have died rather than commit such a breach of manners as assuming that something was actually wrong. She broke the connection at last and exclaimed, "Joat!"

  "She has a suit," Simeon said, "first thing I gave her. She's probably in it right now. Why aren't you?"

  She dashed for the cabinet holding her space suit and began to struggle into it.

  "Come to me, Channa," he said, in a wildly facetious tone, "come, touch the hard, male core of my innermost being."

  "Ee-yuck, is that the sort of romance you've been studying? Try another mode."

  "When I've world enough and time, lovely one, but have a look at what I've managed to arrange as stop signs."

  Seemingly from out of nowhere, three communications satellites came diving towards the incoming ship, two striking it head on and one slightly astern. Whole sections of the scaffolding and outer skin of the derelict sublimed in white flashes that expanded into circles with zero-g perfection. The alien ship was not slowed—there was too much kinetic energy in that mass—but its vector altered slightly.

  "Comsats aren't supposed to be able to move like that!" Channa exclaimed tightly. Simeon's sensors could hear the pounding of her heart, analyze the ketones her sweat-damp skin was emitting. Fear under hard control. The lady has guts, he thought.

  "A little something I cooked up on my own," he said smugly.

  "Cooked in the wrong sort of pot, you crazy loon. Without those satellites, we'll be out of communication with half the universe for weeks."

  "Channa, if I hadn't done that we'd be out of communication with the all of the universe permanently. Besides, my satellite tactic worked!"

  Channa looked up at the main monitor and saw that the projected vector had skewed slightly. "Not enough," she muttered. "Please don't use any more of our comm satellites like billiard balls, Simeon. If we do survive this, they'll be needed more than ever."

  "Oh-oh," Simeon muttered.

  "Oh-oh?" she repeated anxiously.

  It means, I screwed the pooch, Channa, Simeon thought. Aloud he went on. "SS Conrad, dump your carrier modules and get out of that sector. You are now directly in the path of the incoming ship."

  "No-can-do SSS-900-C. I've got a full load here. The company'll have my ass if I desert it."

  "The company'll have to hold a seance to get it, then, 'cause if you stay put, you're about to become immortal. Jump it!"

  "Now!" Channa shouted. "It's less than two k-thousand kilometers from you. Now, dammit!"

  "No shit!" the pilot shouted and disconnected the "cab," the crew quarters and control section of the ship, from the much larger freight storage sections.

  They watched the tiny cab move with agonizing slowness across the seemingly endless bow of the strange ship.

  "Down on station horizon," Simeon instructed, "ninety-degrees, straight down."

  "Down? You want me to stop? With that bastard coming right for me! Are you crazy?"

  "It's your only chance, buddy. She's shallow on the bottom but, by Ghu, is she wide! Show me what kind of pilot you are! Not what kind of smear you'll make."

  Obediently, the little ship flared energy, applying thrust at right-angles to its previous vector. Its path shifted, slowly at first and then with growing speed like a bell-curve graph across a computer screen. Slowly, slowly, descending, a bright spot against the ever larger mass approaching them.

  "Oh shit, oh shit," the captain whispered desperately. "Help?"

  The intruder was less than a kilometer away, now, from the cab which looked like a white pin-point against the black hull of the stranger. At half a kilometer it cleared the leading edge of the incoming ship and the pilot began to laugh wildly.

  "Keep going," Simeon ordered sharply, to be heard through the hysteria. "It's about to hit your freighter. Keep moving till I tell you to stop."

  "It's ore," the captain gasped though he sounded more as if he was weeping, "iron ore. Nickel-iron-carboniferous, in ten-kilo globules."

  Aw, crap! Simeon thought, as the intruder struck the freighter with majestic slowness. The forward third of its hull vanished in the fireball, and so did much of the freighter's cargo. The energy-release and spectrographic analysis would tell him a good deal about the composition. Right now he had millions of special delivery meteors pouring down from the breached holds onto his station. Great example of Newtonian physics, action and reaction.

  The collision had, serendipitously, damped much of the incoming ship's remaining velocity, but the fragments of ship and cargo had picked it up for themselves. He tracked the myriad trajectories of the space flotsam and relayed the information to the ships in the scatter area, directing them into still more impossible flight patterns. He assigned the computer responsibility for tracking and blasting the larger chunks of ore with the station's lasers. No problems with dispersion when the stuff was in your face. On the other hand, there was one hell of a lot of it. Simeon set the computer to figuring out just how much would get through.

  He realized that Channa was staring at the monitor in horrified fascination. "Hey Hap, Happy baby, get in the shaft core."

  "Why?" she asked. "It's stopping."

  "Slowing, yes, but if it so much as kisses me on the cheek, it'll breach the station and you're on a one-way trip to the nebula. We need you here, so shaft me baby."

  "Shaft yourself," she said. "It has come to a complete cessation of forward movement."

  A final flare of energy left the aft third of the intruder's hull slumping and melting, the drive cores and conduction vanes white-hot and misting titanium-rutile monofiber.

  "So it has," Simeon said mildly.

  Channa gave a giddy whoop and slumped against the central shaft, trying to wipe at the sweat that filmed her face. Her glove clacked against the faceplate of her helmet.

  "Dead, stock still," he said, feeling intense relief. "Relative to the station, that is."

  With a glance at his column, Channa hit the disconnect switch and the red warning lights stopped flashing. Simeon began to announce stand-down to Condition Yellow in dulcet, paternal tones. Channa took off her helmet and began to confer with the Lethe leader, reestablishing the usual formal relations.

  When at last they disconnected from their various crucial chores, Channa looked at her incoming electronic messages and laughed. "By God, but we're a resilient species. Look at these."

  Simeon scanned them and laughed, too. "I haven't even finished flushing the excess adrenalin from my system and they're already complaining about lost cargo and insurance. I love the human race. We're consistently more concerned with trivia than serious threats."

  "
And we're not even out of danger, are we?"

  "Out of mortal danger. That thing could have totaled us. The ore will cause a lot of trouble and expense, so let's maintain Condition Yellow for a while."

  That would keep nonessentials out of the exterior compartments, mostly industrial areas anyway, and everyone in suits with helmets in reach and within sprinting distance of the shelters. Megacredits of money were being lost, of course, most of which would be paid by Lloyds' Interstellar.

  Channa was examining the strange ship on a close screen.

  "Next question is who, or what's, aboard."

  "And if there's anything left of the pilot captain," Simeon added, "who's broken regulations I didn't know existed till now. I sent out a dozen probes to secure available information on what's left. Ah! Input!"

  The main screen blanked, and then displayed a schematic of the strange craft, shifting to a three-dimensional model as the computers extrapolated.

  "So that's what it looked like before it started hitting things and melting down its drives," Simeon murmured as brain and brawn surveyed an elongated sphere amid its tangle of extensions. "And now I'll subtract what doesn't appear to be part of the original construction."

  The resulting model didn't look much like the slagged ruin tumbling slowly through space in the real-time image that Simeon kept up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Channa leaned forward and frowned at such an unfamiliar design. Huge it certainly was. At least eighty kilotons mass, with extravagant ship-bays and airlocks, old-fashioned cooling vanes around the equator . . .

  "That looks like human construction," she said thoughtfully, "Just not any model I've ever seen or heard about." Human civilization had been unified at the beginning of starflight and their ships bore a family resemblance.

  "It does look vaguely human-made," Simeon agreed, "but I can't even find a match in historical files of Jane's All the Galaxy's Spaceships for the last century. The composition is odd, too; metal-metal fiber matrix. Ferrous alloys. No comparable design for the last two centuries. Hmmm."