by John Barnes
So wherever you looked, every possible regulation was being conspicuously obeyed, yet the overwhelming feeling was of carnival just erupting. On the muster deck where the B&Es were doing final check-and-stow, gear whipped from hand to hand and slapped into place with the speed and precision of an ecstatic tapdancer. Unaccustomed camaraderie swept the engine room as engineers throttled back the Casimir reactors and walked the synthesizers through cooldown. The chief officers in the worryball were as singing-on precise as ever about keeping more than four hundred million tons of battlesphere moving at several kilometers per second from crashing into densely populated human space, during an approach that had to be singing-on to the centimeter in its last few kilometers, but with a disconcerting sense of fun. Everywhere on board the letter of every rule was respected reverently, but the rules as a whole were stretched like shrink-wrap, barely containing the roiling spirit of joyful impending anarchy.
In their passenger suite, a deeply bored ensign, who clearly wanted to be anywhere else, took forever about mustering out the three CUPVs, making sure everything was done Spatial-style (i.e., officially, punctiliously, and with no sense of proportion). Yet even Ensign Petrawang was smiling shyly as she checked off information and took voice prints.
Finally she said, “All right, as far as I can tell, I’ve put you through every single procedure I’m supposed to put you through. You can stay here, or hang out on one of the observation decks, but either way since there’re no windows in the ship, what you’ll be doing is watching a screen. Most of us crewies on board prefer to use the goggles because you get a holo view and you can hop from camera to camera to give yourself a real djeste of what’s going on.
“But whichever you do, make sure you make it to Muster Deck A in plenty of time. The Captain always does his farewells in order of rank, starting from the bottom up, which means you’re first—so it would sure be noticed if you weren’t there or weren’t ready.” She smiled again. Jak thought that if Petrawang hadn’t been depilated for the Forces, and if she had been wearing something more flattering than a shapeless coverall, she might have been pretty.
Dujuv smiled back and said, “Thank you for the warning and thank you for reminding us where we stand around here.”
“My lieutenant would have wanged me good if I hadn’t warned you. If you precess the Captain one millisecond before you’re off his ship, he can brig you till you die of old age. So be on time, and be serious—the Captain’s all right, but he’s still a captain, and if captains have senses of humor, maybe I’ll see that when I’m a captain, but not much before.
“And as far as where you stand goes, CUPV, that’s singing-on, what I said, you go first because you’re at the bottom, and that’s what your standing is. If we were also dismissing a toaster, a vacuum cleaner, and the ship’s cat today, you’d still be first in line. Now enjoy the view, be where you’re supposed to when you’re supposed to, and remember to be grateful when you’re a civilian again.”
After she left, they pulled on visors to catch the view. By now Up Yours was well within the whirling seventeen arms of the constantly precessing Aerie, each arm a string of twenty-five habitats, each habitat a flat disk two hundred kilometers across, separated from its neighbors above and below by a little less than five hundred kilometers of space.
As Jak clicked from camera to camera, sometimes cross-monitoring in two different eyepieces so that he could get a wide-angle stereo view, he saw the many habitats moving slowly in their turning, bending columns, and the little fires on their edges of quarkjets coming on to adjust position. The cables between them were too thin and dark to see, so the dozens of disks, each covered with cities and forests and farmland, appeared to be flying in formation against the black of space. Near ones would sometimes all but fill the sky and even the farthest ones were still almost twice the size of the Moon seen from Earth. In edge on view, you dakked that the disks were truly wafers, only a few hundred meters thick with roofs not more than a kilometer above their surfaces. Passing between the cables to go through an arm—a procedure that the guide-recording assured Jak was safe—gave him a momentary glimpse of a wide landscape below, low-g forests retinated with streams and falls and dotted with what could only be castles, each on a hill surrounded by a broad lawn. The near side of the battlesphere was only about five kilometers above the clear roof, perhaps six kilometers from the treetops; from this close, you could see that it was a world, or at least a big fragment of one, and somehow the term “habitat” felt wrong. Slowing as they were for landing, they were moving at only about eight thousand kilometers per hour, and it took almost two minutes for the landscape to roll past beneath.
Jak checked with his purse. The place was called Scadia, and it was position ten on branch three, population seven million, deliberately with only five small cities, principal products handicrafts, gravity averaging 13.7 percent with 30 percent variability, average temperature twenty-two Celsius, the locally defined principal social groupings are—
He switched back to the general channel. For one awful second he’d almost been exposed to more ethnography. Now that he thought of it, Scadia was one of Greenworld’s allies in the Confederacy of the Aerie, part of the blocking coalition that kept the Aerie from merging into a single large polity with the potential to threaten the Hive’s hegemony. So besides the pretty castles and park-like land between, they were toves. If he had to know what table manners to follow on a visit there, he could always look it up. Comfortable with being exactly as ignorant as he wanted to be, Jak went back to watching Up Yours approach the docking body.
As they approached, the arms were closer together and they saw habitats more full on and less from the edge, so that the habitats in Jak’s view became an ever greater part of the sky. Finally Up Yours coasted on her cold jets a bare few kilometers above the wide metal plain of the docking body, a sphere six hundred kilometers across, to which all seventeen arms of the Aerie were tied. From the ship’s cameras Jak could see five inward facing habitats, each as wide as an eighth of the sky and separated from its neighbor by a gap of star-filled sky.
Jak was so lost in the view through his goggles, sitting on the suite’s sofa next to Myx, that he actually jumped from surprise when Up Yours dove through one of the fifty-kilometer-wide docking entrances on the inner sphere, dipping into the dark below the metal surface, extending her docking pylons to meet the linducer track on the inside of the huge sphere, and at last settling into maglev contact with the barest of discernible accelerations. “We have turned off the helm,” the captain’s voice said, “and we are decelerating normally on the linducer track. Relative to the inner wall of the docking body we are moving at about six hundred kilometers per hour; we will be matched to local surface velocity and secured in our berth in about twenty minutes. Final crew rendezvous and dismissal for off-ship leave will be ten minutes after we reach our berth and will begin at that time exactly.”
Jak pulled off his headset and saw that his two toves were doing the same. “How about we get to Muster Deck A? That ensign sounded serious.”
They were there in plenty of time, and because no one wanted the dismissal to run one second more than necessary, a lieutenant came by to make sure the CUPVs knew what to do, though for some reason he made Ensign Petrawang give the actual instructions.
“All right.” Petrawang looked about as bored as was possible while keeping her eyes open. “Stand here. Salute when the Senior Techny shouts ‘The Captain,’ and make sure the knife edge of your palm cuts across your sternum, singing-on forty-five, have your thumb in line with your palm, and you want your left arm behind you at a ninety degree angle that you could use to navigate with, fist squared and rolled tight. Hold the salute till the Captain says ‘Rest position.’ Then stand in rest position till he approaches you. Do not look around, not even a little bit. That’s one of his particular precessors.
“Salute again as soon as you can see him in your peripheral vision. Hold the salute while he makes small talk
with you. Agree with everything he says, appear to be pleasantly surprised by all of it (and look like none of it ever occurred to you before), and do your damnedest to convince the whole world that you enjoy it.
“The techny walking behind the officers will tell you when to go back to rest position. Stand in that until the Senior Techny shouts ‘Captain going out,’ then move to salute, hold that until the Senior Techny shouts ‘Per captain’s instructions, you are dismissed.’ And at that magic moment, you get to turn and walk off the ship; your bags will be in the receiving area; and once your back foot leaves the gangplank, you are no longer auxiliaries in the Hive Spatial, and you can resume your normal lives.” She turned to the lieutenant. “Shall I ask the CUPVs that question?”
“Absolutely.”
“Why did you put in for CUPV? Passenger fare is the same, and you’d only have had to stay in your cabin. As a CUPV not only did you spend all your time on tube maintenance, but if a war had broken out with us in flight, you’d have been in for the duration. I haven’t been able to speck what you were thinking, or if.”
Myxenna answered. “We’re PSA cadets all headed for the special branches. Union points are useful, since we may be called on to join the ASU, and we’re supposed to get as much different experience as we can.”
The officer supervising Petrawang spoke. “So you’re going to be spies or agents of some kind?”
“If we pass, sir,” Dujuv said.
“And you’re on some kind of training mission now?”
“That’s as close to the subject as we’re allowed to go, sir,” Jak said.
“You see, Ensign Petrawang? There are at least three people on this vessel with a more absurd job than yours. Under the terms of our bet, you owe me all I can drink tonight.”
“I do, sir.” The lieutenant airswam away, clearly pleased. As Petrawang pushed off after him, she said, quietly, over her shoulder, “Think seriously about taking a merchant ship home.”
The general attention siren whizzed twice, and the Senior Techny shouted “The Captain!” The CUPVs jammed their feet into the parade straps on the floor and snapped into salute.
Once the Captain began small talk, it became immediately apparent why Petrawang and the officer had gone out of their ways to prepare them. The captain was an ange, like Dean Caccitepe, but even taller and at least two hundred fifty years old, maybe three hundred. When the Captain stooped to talk to him, Jak noted how deep, wise, and kind the Captain’s eyes seemed to be, and tried not to note the faint whiff of gin and citrus.
The Captain cleared his throat. “So you three were CUPVs on this mission.”
“Yes, sir,” Jak said, since the Captain was looking at him.
“And that was as part of something you were doing for the PSA, I understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Dujuv said, for the Captain had moved down the line.
“And the PSA is the Public Service Academy, is it not?”
“Yes, sir.” Myx managed not to sound puzzled or surprised, and Jak silently gave her points for that, since he wasn’t sure he could have managed.
“Well,” the Captain said, after a very long pause and stepping back to look them all over, “the Public Service Academy is a very fine thing. It encourages public service. I hope that all you young people will seriously consider going into public service.”
He wandered on up the line; a few seconds after he was out of Jak’s peripheral vision, the techny who had been the last in the little party of ship’s officers said, “Rest position, CUPVs, and keep it neat.”
After a very long time, during which there was plenty of time to meditate on the ever-softer and more distant drone of the Captain’s voice talking to each of the higher ranks, the Senior Techny shouted ‘Captain going out,’ and Jak and his toves went back to salute position. Jak had read somewhere that the salute originated a thousand years ago in the old Martian Empire, as a signal of submission, indicating that you were willing to cooperate in either your own torture or your own execution.
Jak spent some no-time mentally in Disciplines meditation before the Senior Techny shouted, “Per Captain’s instructions, you are dismissed.” Muster Deck A rang with a sustained cheer and the three toves were nearly bowled over by an extremely orderly flying stampede. In the docking body, grav was less than one percent of standard, and airswimming was fast and easy. The crewies, officers and enlisted alike, all moved fast and stayed close but gave way to the person on the right or of higher rank, so quickly and neatly that there was hardly any turbulence or drag to the flow of thousands of bodies; they went through the big main doors like water swirling down a drain.
Since Jak and his toves were somewhere below a toaster in rank, they were quickly swept to the back of the flow by the tremendous tide of precedence, but the overall flow was so swift that still it was less than three minutes before they made their last touch on the gangplank and bounced into the receiving area to claim their luggage—civilian once more.
CHAPTER 5
Weird-bad
Dujuv asked, “Well, now what? Do we just take the gripliner out to Greenworld, go to the Royal Palace, knock on the door, and say ‘Hi, we happened to be in the neighborhood?’ ”
Myxenna wrapped her bags in a cargo tow and grabbed the sling. “I suppose it would be politer to call first. There must be some public access terminals around someplace? Speck you shouldn’t call direct on your purse, Jak, security and all that.”
They airswam down a long shopping corridor that appeared to be mostly duty-free liquor stores; Myxenna airswam close to Jak and whispered, “I know somebody who will be shopping here soon.”
Jak made a little raspberry and snickered. “Yeah, I was wondering if anyone else noticed.”
“I suppose the job must be mostly ceremonial, in peacetime.”
They found a Pertrans stop before they found public access terminals. “Well, they’ll have them for sure at the gripliner station,” Jak pointed out. “Let’s just go there.”
The docking body of the Aerie was less than a fifth the size of the Hive, and because it did not have a black hole enclosure at its center, routes could be much more direct. The Pertrans whisked them right across the big metal sphere to Station Eight, where gripliners came in from Arm Eight, in about five minutes.
It was an icy five minutes. Myx and Dujuv stared out windows in opposite directions, despite the fact that all there is to see out a Pertrans window is either the tunnel wall or the instantaneous flash of a passing window. Jak could see no way to get them to even start being civil to each other. He was beginning to miss the imposed courtesy of the battlesphere.
Near the ticket counter in the gripliner station, they found some public access terminal booths. All three of them piled into a large booth and locked the door; then Jak told his purse to get Sesh on a fresh back channel.
The woman whose image appeared on the screen was very not Sesh. She had pale beige skin, big prominent teeth, and little green piggy eyes that glared at them around the nose of an unsuccessful ex-boxer. Her hair was that mud-gray color of age familiar from old photos, but Jak had never seen it on a living person before. Perhaps she was a follower of one of the Tolerated Faiths, rather than the Wager? According to the Solar System Ethnography class, many of them prohibited anti-aging treatments.
“My name is Jordesta Mattanga, and I need to know immediately why you are attempting an unauthorized communications access to Princess Shyf. I also need your names and citizenship.”
“Myxenna Bonxiao, Hive.” “Dujuv Gonzawara, Hive.” “Jak Jinnaka, Hive. Uh, we’re her friends, and we came at her specific request—”
Mattanga looked annoyed. “I have no record of any such request.”
“I don’t know if you necessarily would,” Jak said; “because I don’t know your communications and security arrangements, but the Princess requested us through back channels, and she specifically asked that we not recontact her till this point in the mission, for security reasons. I am unaware of w
ho else she might have told.”
“I see. One moment.” The screen froze, leaving Jordesta Mattanga’s image glaring, one big lumpy gray eyebrow raised like a caterpillar crossing something that hurt its feet.
Of course, their camera was still on, so they couldn’t do anything without being observed. Down by Jak’s knee, Dujuv’s hand signaled, Weird-bad … weird-bad … weird-bad. …
There was a clanging noise as the overrides barred the booth door. Mattanga’s image began to move again. “Talk to Princess Shyf. She has graciously agreed to give you an exact two minutes of her time. You had better persuade someone that this is not the stupidest youthful prank ever pulled, because if we don’t like what we’re hearing, we will send out security agents to bring you here by force and jail you all till we hear answers we like. You have two minutes.”
Sesh came on the screen. “What are you three idiots doing here? I know Jak has to be the idiot-in-chief, but how could either of you be stupid enough to follow him? And Jak, I know you’re not the brightest thing that ever put on trousers, but this is dumber even than I’d have expected from you. Didn’t you get my message?”
“That’s why we came,” Jak protested.
“How could you be that unbelievably stupid? Didn’t I say not to communicate in any way? And how in all of Nakasen’s theorems could you have afforded to get here anyway?”
“You paid our passage,” Dujuv said.
Sesh stared at him as if he’d really gone mad. “Is that what Jak told you?”
“It’s true,” Jak said. “You arranged CUPV passage for all three of us—”
“Ridiculous!”
“And you specifically asked us to come and not to call you till we got here.”
Sesh’s eyes were flashing fire. “A one-minute message that said I didn’t want to hear from you, ever again, and not to try to contact me—how could—”