The City and the Ship

by Anne McCaffrey

  "String this, would you, Patsy?" she said, passing over the reel. The optical fiber was encased in woven tungsten-filament, with receptor-booster chips at intervals. Barely thicker than thread, it had a breaking strain of several tons. Tacked to the wall behind them, neither her implants nor Patsy's suit communits could fade out. Patsy welded the outer end to the hull beside the hatch, using the spot heater in her construction suit's gauntlet.

  "Ready?" Channa said, taking a deep breath.

  "Surely am." Patsy came up behind her, arc pistol ready.

  "Standing by," Simeon said.

  The keypad lights blinked green and amber. "I think it's saying there's some doubt about the atmosphere," Channa said. "It's definitely pressurized in there." She attached a sensor line to the surface.

  "They're in trouble," Simeon said. "Hear that whining?" Channa shook her head, and felt him boost the audio pickups of her helmet. A faint tooth-grating sound came through.

  "What is that?"

  "That's the main internal drive cores," Simeon replied grimly. "The powerplant's down, but they're still superconducting. The alloys they used back then were tough. They built 'em more redundant then, too."

  "Which means?"

  "Which means . . . to stop this thing, the pilot put everything the powerplant had into the drive. The exterior coils blew before it could go all out. Now the internal coil's going to go."

  "Bad news," Patsy said.

  "It's going to blow?" Channa asked apprehensively. The energies needed to move megatons between stars were immense.

  Simeon listened. "Not just yet, but soon. Building, but the noise will be considerably more audible before I'd panic. Get that inner hatch open, woman! I'll send the troops. You've got about thirty minutes before you have to be off."

  The interior airlock slid open. The two women kept their helmets firmly on as it slid down again and the air hissed in. Channa looked down at the readouts on her sleeve and punched for analysis.

  "Oxygen's down, CO2's way up," she said grimly. "Necrotic ketones, or so it says—decay products. I'd hate to have to breathe this stuff. Could anyone breath it and live?"

  "Depends on natural tolerances," Patsy replied. "And it might not be bad further in." Being an environmental maintenance specialist, she knew the parameters. "From the volume of n.k.'s, their scrubbers must have been down for a while."

  The inner hatch of the airlock slid open. Now that they were no longer in a soundless vacuum, the exterior pickups of their suits relayed the hiss. Unfortunately, a high-pitched whine was now equally audible: the kind that made the hair on your arms lift up. Channa looked down the long corridor, shabby with age and dim with the emergency glowstrips' ghostly blue light.

  Flies buzzed around them. Patsy slapped one against the wall.

  "Blowflies," she said after a good look. There was a faint quaver in her voice. "Had 'em on the ranch."

  "Sound pickup says there are live ones down there," Channa said. "Let's go."

  * * *

  Doctor Chaundra's hands flew over his keypad as he made notes. He was a smallish brown-skinned man with delicate bones and a precise, scholarly manner.

  "Fifty maximum, you say?"

  Simeon switched back to the implant data filling another part of his consciousness. Channa's breathing sounded ragged; her heartbeat was elevated, and the stomach-acid level indicated suppressed nausea. Simeon wasn't surprised. The things she was seeing made him feel a little sick in an entirely nonphysical way that was still highly unpleasant.

  "Short-term, improvised attempt at coldsleep," she said, voice struggling for the objectivity of a report. He looked at the tangle of cobbled-together equipment around living and dead. "Probably to cut down on air consumption. Heavy equipment failures."

  The latest chamber held mostly dead ones, eyes fallen in and dried lips shrunk back over grinning teeth. Maggots, too. Some of the corpses were children, dead children nestled against dead mothers. In a few, the maggots gave a ghastly semblance of life, moving the swollen, blackened limbs. About the only mercy was the elastic nets that held living and dead down to the pallets on the deck or to the bunks. Evidently someone had foreseen that the interior gravity fields might go. Simeon imagined walking into one of those chambers and finding the putrefying bodies floating loose. . . .

  "This one—" Channa began, swallowing and bending over a body that was either still alive or only recently dead. Drifting maggots brushed the surface of her faceplate and clung wetly, writhing. She retched, then forced herself to brush them away.

  A chunngggg sound echoed through the still air. "What was that?"

  Simeon split his viewpoint yet again. The rescue ship hovering off the side of the hulk had launched a missile carrying a large-diameter hose and attached to a pumping system: a force-deck system which punched through the hull and sealed itself.

  "Air harpoon," he said. "We'll be pumping in a second."

  "I kin hear it," Patsy said from the corridor. Her arc gun crashed, opening a sealed door. "More in heah. 'Bout the same."

  "With fifty living, we should have no trouble," the doctor was saying to Simeon in the safe, clean sickbay office. Chaundra tapped for a closeup on one of the recordings, looking at the life-signs readouts beside the wasted face of a refugee. "Coldsleep dosed, the old partial method; very unsafe dosage, and oxygen deprivation. Dehydration, starvation, but mostly inadequate air. Hmm."

  He blinked. "Physical type? Sometimes there is genetic divergence on isolated colonies. I must check. These look to be of sudeuropan race—archaic type, very pure. We should evacuate them as soon as possible."

  "I'm working on it," Simeon said with controlled passion. I'm never going to look at battlefield reconstructions quite the same way again, he thought.

  Through Channa's ears, he heard feet clacking in the corridor outside, stickfields in the suit shoes substituting for gravity. The volunteers came in briskly enough, inflatable rescue bubbles in their hands, then halted in disbelief. One tried to control his retching for a moment and then went into an excruciating and dangerous fit of vomiting inside a closed helmet. His squadmates removed it, only to have his paroxysm grow worse as the stink hit his nostrils. The luckless volunteer went into the first of the bubbles.

  "Get moving!" Channa ordered. Only Simeon could hear the tremors in her voice beyond the range of normal ears. "The living ones are marked with a slash of yellow from a cargo checker. Use plasma feeds, the emergency antidotes, and get them out of here. These people belong in regeneration. Now!"

  Raggedly, then with gathering speed, the stationers moved to their work. Channa escaped back into the corridor, exhaling a breath she had not been conscious of holding. Simeon was profoundly thankful she had not tried cracking her suit seals when the air hose went in. It would take months of vacuum to get the stink out of this ship. Much more time than the vessel had. The final fire of the interior coils would at least cleanse it.

  "How long?" she asked.

  "Not less than an hour, not more than three," he replied. "I think the pirate hypothesis is out."

  Channa nodded jerkily; too many families and children. Pirates were much more common in fiction than in fact, anyway. Bodies floated in the next chamber down, and medics working over the three living before transferring them to life bubbles.

  "Ms. Hap, I'm !Tez Kle." The Sendee wore a medical assistant's arm-flash on his suit.

  Channa glanced at him in surprise. Not many aliens chose to specialize in Terran medicine. Of course, Sondee were rather humanoid, if you managed to ignore the four eyes—two large and golden about where eyes should be, and two more above the whorled ridges that served as ears; you could not sneak up on a Sendee—and the lack of any facial features apart from a nostril slit and round suckerlike mouth. They had lovely voices, with far more vocal range and control than a human.

  She came up beside the bubbles. "You're in charge?" He nodded. "Let me give you a hand," she said.

  The first figure she turned to had reddish-b
lack hair, a short muscular man with a square face. She released his restraints and lifted him, then gave him a gentle shove into the body-length sack, sealed it and activated it. His color seemed to improve immediately. She turned to his companion and froze.

  "Channa, your vital signs just did the strangest little jig. What's the problem?" Simeon asked.

  This young man was tall, close to two meters, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, shapely and muscular as an athlete. He had a clean, classically perfect profile, with firmly molded chin and sensitive mouth. His delicately curving cheekbones were brushed by long dark lashes, the corners of his eyes tilted upwards. His long hair was blue-black, curling back from his high intelligent forehead to fall almost to his shoulders.

  Channa sighed in admiration, then caught herself. This stud is so handsome even being sick makes him look good.

  "Oh ho," Simeon crowed. "Very nice, Channa, but if you don't put Adonis there in his sack, he's going to go a very unflattering shade of blue."

  "Em . . . right." She unbuckled the man and sealed him in his sack, connecting the two bags together. Then she tugged them behind her to the lock where she turned them over to the waiting med-techs. The goods-transporter's hold was filled with floating, jostling sacks while Channa and the med-tech chief stood in the lock, checking their sensors for heart-beats.

  "Guess we got them all," !Tez Kle said. "But I don't think we can save them all. We left those we were certain we couldn't help," he said apologetically.

  "Nothing else you could do," Channa told him. "We don't have time for anything else. Go," she said, and slapped his shoulder. "I've got a tug outside." She sealed the end of the caterpillar lock behind him and waited impatiently for the pilot to retract it. "Damn, I wish we could have gotten to the bridge."

  "You and Patsy give it a try," Simeon answered. "Every bit of data will help, but we're cutting it a little close. I'm positioning tugs to push that wreck away from the station and soon."

  Channa looked up sharply. "It's still a danger to you?"

  "Nothing this brain can't handle," Simeon said blithely. "You do what you can, brawn."

  She looked down at the notescreen tethered at her waist, studying the map of the ship's interior which she had managed to acquire from its own data banks, archaic as they were.

  "I'll try through here," she said, struggling with the toggles of the hatch. "It'd be the more direct route, if it's open. If it isn't, I'll rendezvous with Patsy immediately."

  * * *

  "I need some people for tug and detonations work," Simeon announced. "It's going to be dicey."

  The assembly room beneath the south-polar docking bay was full of second-wave volunteers, those not needed or qualified for the emergency medical work. Every single one stepped forward. Despite the seriousness of the situation, Simeon found time for a grim internal smile. That old line's worked its challenge since Gilgamesh, he thought, proving that even the oldest books on military psychology were right. People were very reluctant to appear frightened in front of others, especially their friends. He called the roll of those he needed. They were already suited up, helmets under their arms. Gus, of course, and six of the more experienced tug pilots, with six of the mining explosives experts who had been taking R & R on the SSS. "Thank you and I thank all the rest of you, too."

  As soon as the room emptied of all but the participants, he began the briefing with the truth.

  "That ship is going to blow. The engines, by the sound of them, are critically unbalanced, redlining far off scale. We've got the survivors off her. But we've got to get her far enough from the station so that when she goes, she won't take us with her. That's not the only problem. We've got to be sure she'll break into the smallest possible fragments and that they are thrown in a favorable dispersal pattern."

  The explosives men grinned at each other. "Easiest thing in the world, Simeon," their spokesman said with a rakish smile. "If you know what you're doing."

  "We do," one of the others said, thumping the spokesman jovially on the back. The man didn't so much as rock on his toes.

  "That's good to know, guys! Can you tug pilots match their skill by redlining your engines a little to pull her as far away from us as you can?"

  "Hell, Simeon," Gus said, "you oughta know we'd have no trouble doing that little thing for you."

  "I'll be monitoring and should be able to give you fair warning to get yourselves clear." He paused a moment, anxious despite their obvious disregard for the inherent dangers. "Have I made the situation clear?"

  Gus grinned. "Couldn't be clearer, station man," he said, giving his broad shoulders a preparatory twitch in response to the challenge. "And we don't have much time for further chatter!"

  Another voice broke in: Patsy's. Simeon keyed her visual transmission to one of the ready-room screens; she was back in the control seat of her tug.

  "My, ain't the machismo level high around here? You got one tug already in place, Simeon—mine. Count me in, too."

  Gus winced. "Look, Patsy, we're in very deep, ah—"

  "Very deep shit," she finished, grinning at him. "Ah know the words, Gus."

  Everybody laughed. Simeon looked them over and stifled a wave of bitter longing. A military commander of any stature led his troops from the front, not from an impervious titanium column. Don't worry, if they fail you'll be the only one left to say what happened, thanks to that same titanium column. If you can live with your conscience, that is.

  "I'll keep my eye on the coils and give you enough warning to peel off," Simeon promised.

  Almost simultaneously, helmets covered the faces of this small band of heroes.

  * * *

  "This is taking more time than it's worth," Channa said in disgust, giving the control panel a final thump with her fist. The door valved open.

  "Damn! And I thought that was a station legend," she said. "Does it work for you, Simeon?"

  "Having a servo whack me with a wrench to make me work properly?" he asked. "No, not often. The bridge ought to be right down there. And hurry."

  "How are we handling the demolition?" she asked him, stepping through the half-open door and trotting down the darkened way, her helmet light fanning ahead. Mercifully, no bodies floated about this section.

  "I've got a team rigging explosives all around the ship to blow it to," he paused, his own nerves making him play the clown, "smithereens. Real, genuine, non-station piercing smithereens. It would be disgraceful, utterly disgraceful, to get holed by flying debris after surviving this morning, don't you think? Ah, the tug volunteers are in place, ready to grapple. Ah! They've broken her out of orbital inertia."

  Movement was not obvious this far in the bowels of the dying ship. "Who's in charge of the team?" Channa asked.

  "Gus."

  "Patsy said he was a good pilot," Channa commented. "Soon as I finish here, I'll join her. Is she still standing by at the hatch?"

  "She is, to pick you up and bring you straight back to the station with any information you discover."

  "I can scan the info back to you, Sim-mate, but first I have to find it, you know." She stumbled over some jumble piled in the corridor and recovered herself.

  "You and Patsy get straight back here. I can't have my brawn risking her neck when . . ."

  "Simeon," she said reasonably, "brawns are supposed to risk their necks for their brains. And if you, the station, are at risk, I am required to reduce that risk any way possible. This time I can do it by helping tug the risk away from here. Have I made myself clear on this point?"

  "I don't like it," Simeon said in a disgruntled mumble. "Foolish risk."

  "Thank you for your input, but Simeon . . ."

  "Yeah?"

  "Don't you ever try to forbid me to do the job I'm here to do. You got that?"

  "Right in the forehead, sweetheart."

  "Not quite where I was aiming, but it'll do," Channa said.

  "If you get through to the bridge of that ship, can I ask you for a download?" Simeon
said plaintively.

  "Why else am I penetrating this about-to-blow-up wreck?" Channa said. "Patsy, you read me?"

  "Welcome to the pahty, Channa," came Patsy's cheerful voice.

  "You don't mind my crashing?"

  Patsy laughed. "Watch yoah choice of words, girl."

  * * *

  "I just noticed something," Channa said, slowing her pace.

  "What?"

  "Paper. What's all this paper doing around?" There were sheets of it drifting down the corridor and sticking with static attraction to the rubbery walls.

  "This lumbering hulk must be filled with gear so ancient it's exotic," Simeon said.

  "Paper storage?" she said dubiously.

  "Maybe they regressed."

  "Could it originally have been piloted by a shellperson?" Channa asked, suddenly jumping to some conclusions that ought to have been more obvious to both herself and Simeon. If she got the edge on him on this one . . .

  "Highly unlikely," Simeon said patronizingly. "B & B ships weren't that common then. All of these little back-of-beyond colonies were literally a shot in the dark, too risky to expend us on. C'mon, forward is to your right, one more passage to reach that control room."

  "Aye, sir," she said. She worked her way forward, past leaking pipes and the occasionally sparking control boxes, ruptured by the overloads of the catastrophic deceleration.

  "Paper," Channa said in wonder, wishing she could touch the valuable substance with her bare hands.

  "And books! At least I think that's what I saw when you glanced into that corner. No, further right. Yes! Books!"

  "No time for browsing now," Channa said firmly.

  "Right," he said. "Antiquarian reflex, sorry."

  "Ah, I am now at the control room," she said.

  It was large and circular; most of the consoles were under shrink-shrouds of plastic that looked rigid with age. Raw, hasty jury-rigs had restored a few panels to functionality. She had to duck under festoons of cable which were draped to and fro with no noticeable pattern. In the dimming light, she saw jury-rigged control boxes taped to consoles. The whole bridge seemed to have been reconstructed with mad abandon.