The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  One reason that The Lotus Jewel thought of the deep sky as a flat backdrop was that when she gloved the true stars, she felt no pushback at all. It was so much like rubbing her hand against smooth wallpaper that she had come to believe that the deep sky actually was smooth wallpaper. What she saw through the viewing window in the Starlight Lounge seemed less real to her than what she saw and heard and felt under the virtch. This was a curious inversion, if it was an inversion.

  The data channels worked both ways. Her thoughts and motions and even mental images were translated into electronic commands. The remembered smell of a cup of coffee, the conjured landscape of the Gobi Desert, even certain carnal experiences, had been recruited into her suite of neural commands. It was for this reason that encephalic operators took care in what they thought when they were under the cap, and which The Lotus Jewel had accomplished by seldom thinking at all. She was, in fact, a Zen practitioner, able to still her thoughts at will and felt under the cap a greater peace of mind than ever in the world beyond.

  She whispered a command into her throat mike and a part of Ship’s awareness answered and she spat a long-distance radar pulse toward the locus where Corrigan’s calculations had placed Stranger’s Reef.

  The Lotus Jewel placed her palm over that region of the sky and waited for the pinprick that would come with the bounceback. Pulse radar was good for fixing precise position—but you had to know where to aim, or the pulse would miss and travel out forever, growing ever more tenuous in accordance with the inverse square, and the echo, assuming the packet ever did bounce off something, would be a very long time coming and difficult to hear when it did. Every now and then, The Lotus Jewel would detect one of these faint returns, though they were often too indistinct to integrate with any outbound pulse. It seemed to her as if the universe whispered in the distance.

  Silence filled the bridge, as each of those present tried to watch the chronometer without actually doing so. But they all knew what the approximate lag time between the ping and the echo should be, and a curious strain seized each one of them as the sweep hand turned and the digital tally ticked upward.

  When the expected time hit, Satterwaithe even reached out a hand to her panel to steady herself. She felt as if she had peaked through the top of a ballistic arc. “Well,” she said to the bridge at large, “at least we know one place where the Reef isn’t.”

  “Number One, a suggestion.” It was Gorgas, peering into the plotting tank at the narrow, pale region in which the ping had told them (by its silence) that Stranger’s Reef was not. He did not look at Corrigan as he spoke. His face seemed stretched drum-tight, like a chrysalis ready to burst.

  “Aye, captain?” As watch officer, Corrigan commanded until relieved. Gorgas had said “suggestion,” but Corrigan had heard an order and he resented Gorgas exercising command without going through the formal actofrelief.

  “A search pattern around the predicted location,” Gorgas said, “may be useful. Margin of error, don’t y’know.”

  Corrigan flushed and turned to The Lotus Jewel. “Comm, enter the precalculated search pattern.” He said “precalculated” so Gorgas would know that he had already planned to do the search. It would have been too ungodly lucky to have pinned the rock with the point estimate. He had known beforehand that they would have to bracket it with the interval estimate. The Lotus Jewel said, “Search pattern loaded, aye,” and Corrigan said, “Ping,” and The Lotus Jewel, en rapport with Ship, imagined again that she spat.

  The deck waited silently on the echoes, none of them looking at one another. Gorgas, frowning over the plotting tank, whispered a command to Ship, which displayed the projected course of the vessel were it to continue falling free. The path was a cone, for the uncertainties in the extrapolation grew wider the farther the projection. Gorgas noted that the cone did not intersect the pale region. He sighed and shrugged to himself. The one volume of space in which they knew the Reef was not, and they would not pass through it. Gorgas clipped on a headset and pressed the talker. “Engineering,” he said to the hushmike, not wishing to disturb the others on the bridge.

  “What.” That was Bhatterji and he was not asking a question.

  “When will the engines be operational?”

  “When I’m done…”

  Gorgas puzzled over the odd tone he heard in the engineer’s voice, but he had never before heard Bhatterji being defensive, and so he did not know what it sounded like. “Can you give me a soonest likely date and a latest likely date?”

  “No,” said Bhatterji…and the connection was broken.

  Gorgas was a hard man to anger. He ascribed failure to oversight or carelessness rather than to willfulness. Point out the error and let their own motivations drive them. That was his style. Satterwaithe thought he sounded like a complainer who criticized without giving directions; and Corrigan, of course, always heard directions regardless how elliptically Gorgas spoke. But Bhatterji was much like the shipboard cats. He walked where he would. No one had ever pointed out to him a mistake that he did not already know of, and he regarded all such talk as wasteful interference. He knew what he had to do and everyone else need only get out of his way. That was fine as long as he really did know what needed doing. When he turned from the talker in the engine room, the glower he directed at Miko and Rave was not due to any fault of theirs.

  “We can still fix one engine,” Miko said, surprising herself with her own solicitude.

  “I’ve got the parts and the subassemblies for Number Three kitted and staged by the outerlock,” Rave Evermore added.

  “You are fools,” Bhatterji said. “The both of you. If three engines are all we have, the balk line passed fourteen days ago.”

  “But—”

  “Braking at three-quarters, we will be moving forty kisses too fast when we reach Jupiter Roads.”

  Forty kiss of excess velocity was easier to spill than 150. Bhatterji knew that. Really, it was almost good enough. Corrigan could devise a gravity-well maneuver, or skim Jupiter’s atmosphere, or lay a course fourteen days east of Jupiter, because it would take that much longer to slow to the Jovian datum. In any case, “almost” would mean a great deal more work and a great deal more delay—and Bhatterji to blame for every minute of it. He could imagine the smirking self-righteousness of the deck officers. Having promised and failed to deliver, he would look the fool, and more importantly feel it.

  “I’ll be in my office,” he said abruptly. He grabbed a monkey bar and swiveled to go, but checked himself. His apprentices were right. Half a loaf was gall to eat, but it was better than nothing. “We’ll start on Number Three in the morning,” he said. “Rave, you work the panel. Miko, you’ll come outside with me.”

  Gorgas was a hard man to anger; but when Bhatterji cut him off, he could interpret the act as nothing other than a personal affront. As long as he had known the man, there had been this disrespect offered. Gorgas rummaged in the closet of his mind for a reason; but the more he searched, the more he seethed, for he could not comprehend where he had ever given the engineer cause for offense.

  It would not be entirely true to say that Gorgas missed hearing the first echo because he was so immersed in his thoughts. Gorgas was always immersed in his thoughts, only the depth of immersion varied. When Satterwaithe and Corrigan swam up to the tank, he shook himself in irritation at his own distraction. “Well?” he said, and enough of the irritation came out with his voice that both officers looked at him—the one in wounded incomprehension, the other with impatient disdain. The Lotus Jewel, still at the comm board, had swung her clip-chair around and flipped up her goggles to watch.

  “Is that the ship’s projected path?” Satterwaithe asked, tracing the white cone with her finger. “Yes,” she answered herself before Gorgas could speak. “And there is the echo location. Comm, paint the region around the found object.” The Lotus Jewel dispatched another flock of pings, tightly clustered around the object. The return pattern, properly analyzed, would “paint” a pict
ure, since different parts of the asteroid would lie at different distances and be moving in different ways.

  “Not too far off my projection,” Corrigan said about the small red blip in the tank.

  “We’re not grading your report,” Satterwaithe answered offhandedly. And it was only in seeing the brief spasm of anger on Corrigan’s face and recognizing in it a mirror of his own inner fury at Bhatterji that Gorgas was led to say, “Good work, Number One.” This so much surprised Corrigan that he nearly missed what Satterwaithe said next.

  “It’s within the cone,” she said.

  Of course, they had all seen that immediately, but it fell to Satterwaithe to say so aloud and thus make it real. The red dot representing the echo lay just inside the sunward edge of the ship’s projected path-envelope.

  Satterwaithe said, “We need to beat to leeward,” and she and Corrigan exchanged a significant look.

  Gorgas missed the look because he had turned to The Lotus Jewel. “Comm, have there been any storm warnings from the Inner System?”

  “None that I’ve intercepted,” she answered, puzzled at the non sequitur.

  Gorgas pursed his lips, considering the possibilities. The silence was long, as there were a great many possibilities. When it was over, he turned to his two officers. “We shall need to review the weather records for the Trojan Gulf—tally the number and intensity of solar storms felt up this way. But I believe we shall have to take a chance and shut down the hobartium belt to slow our sunward deflection. Do you concur?”

  Corrigan looked at Satterwaithe and his tongue darted out and wet his lips. “I concur.” Satterwaithe nodded silently. Gorgas gathered in their agreements and folded his arms, tucking his hands in under his armpits and resting his chin on his chest.

  “Captain,” said the talker, “this is engineering.”

  “Who is that?” Gorgas asked, breaking out of his study. “Who is that? That’s not Bhatterji.”

  “It’s his mate,” The Lotus Jewel told them. “Hidei.”

  “Ah. Yes, Engines. Report.”

  “Outside rebuild commences on Number Three engine at oh-eight-hundred. Estimated completion in three to five days.”

  Gorgas grunted. So Bhatterji had finally acted. He wondered why Hidei had reported, instead. Was Bhatterji too embarrassed to speak to him directly? Gorgas decided to accept this roundabout acknowledgement as an apology. “What about Engine Two?”

  Hidei hesitated and there was a silence, as if the speaker grille had been muffled. “Ah, there are still problems with that. We’ll start that rebuild in two days, but we, uh, may be short on hobartium for the Hanssen coils.”

  “Very well. Keep me informed.” Gorgas cut the connection and turned to Corrigan tight-lipped. “There was enough hobartium when we started,” he complained. “If the fourth engine is not on line in time…” He did not finish the sentence because there were too many main clauses that might append to the subordinate. Skip past Jupiter into the Outer System. Skim Jupiter too closely and be engulfed by that turbulent atmosphere. Overshoot and circle around and arrive far too late—for the penalty clauses on their cargo would ruin any chance of remaining solvent. Gorgas bent over the plotting tank. “Navigation, we shall need a suite of recovery maneuvers.”

  “Recovery,” said Corrigan.

  “Yes, we shall hit Jupiter Roads with too fast a velocity. Unless you have another milligee or so of deceleration in your pocket.” He chuckled briefly, then dove inside his head.

  Corrigan turned to Satterwaithe. “The sail,” he said, “will be our salvation.”

  Satterwaithe hissed him quiet and Corrigan, perhaps startled at the idea of a snake being hissed at, fell silent. “I don’t think this is the best time,” she whispered, “to mention where the rest of the hobartium went.”

  “Bhatterji had two extra coils in stores,” Corrigan replied sotto voce, “but he wasted it. Moth scrounged our material from odds and ends.”

  Satterwaithe looked at him for what seemed a long time and she turned away without speaking. She herself did not know where Ratline had found the hobartium and she was not certain she wanted to learn.

  “Number One,” said Gorgas, looking up from the plotting tank like a man coming up for air, “I had asked for some course options a week ago. Have they been completed? Yes? Good. Ship. Course projection. Assume scenario. Assumption one: Thrust from engines one, three and four. Assumption two: Resource availability commences at between plus three to plus five days. Assumption three: thrust vector starward, orthogonal to plumb line AB.” He indicated the tank icons for the ship and Stranger’s Reef. “Project.”

  “To avoid the indicated obstacle,” said Ship.

  Gorgas blinked. “Ah…yes. That’s the intention…” Over at her console, The Lotus Jewel wrinkled her forehead. The AI often asked for clarification, but usually only regarding syntax. This was a different sort of clarification. It had sounded almost like a plea for assurance. She made a note and wondered whether the system had begun to skew again.

  The recomputed flight paths increased in curvature the farther out they were projected, depending on the amount of thrust delivered and when it began.

  “A miss,” said Satterwaithe, and even Gorgas heard the relief in her voice.

  “Maybe.” Gorgas was unwilling to discard any possibilities yet. “Without the ping from the Fixed Point Observatory, our True Position remains uncertain. Number One?”

  Corrigan was rubbing his chin. “It won’t be a miss,” he said. “Not with the way our luck has been running.”

  The answer surprised Gorgas. “You almost sound pleased.”

  Corrigan smiled, but given his leathery skin the results were less than satisfactory. He looked, Gorgas thought, a little like Death. “All will be as Allah wills,” the first officer said.

  “Allah,” said Satterwaithe dryly, “or Newton.”

  “Portrait received,” The Lotus Jewel announced from the communications console. The three officers turned from their study of the tank and Gorgas told her to magnify it. She sent the image to the sistines above their heads.

  That asteroid appeared as a fuzzy, false-color image, all reds and greens and blues. The colors told of relative velocities; the hue, of distance. The fuzziness resulted from the mesh size of the grid of pings.

  “It’s rotating,” said Corrigan as he noted the approaching blues and receding reds. “Rapidly.”

  “Ship,” said Gorgas. “Image refinement. Current display. Execute.”

  The image blinked and wiped as the AI interpolated between the measured points and smoothed the contour function. Colors washed out, to be replaced by a whitish animation.

  “It looks like a potato,” said The Lotus Jewel.

  “They all do,” Satterwaithe said.

  “Stranger’s Reef,” murmured Corrigan. The sight seemed to transfix him. Gorgas had to touch his shoulder to get his attention.

  “We will go on rotating watches,” the captain said. “Take a bearing on the Reef every two hours. If you see any parallax, notify me immediately. Understood?” He ran a hand across his hair, felt the moistness on his forehead. Dear Lord, he hoped there would be parallax. Parallax meant relative motion. Parallax meant the ship would miss.

  “Equal eight hour watches?” Satterwaithe asked him.

  “Six hours. Comm…Comm!” The Lotus Jewel removed her virtch hat and looked at him. “You will take fourth watch, as acting third officer. You know how to take a bearing. Anything else, call me or Second Officer Satterwaithe.”

  “Or me,” suggested Corrigan, but Gorgas shook his head.

  “You’ll be asleep when she’s on watch.” He looked around the room and rubbed the back of his right hand. “People, we will probably all lose sleep over nothing at all. Only, better to lose a little sleep than to lose the ship, heh?”

  After Gorgas had retired to his day room, Corrigan turned to Satterwaithe. “He thinks he’s still in the Space Guard. Standing watches. ‘Report immediately.’ Ne
xt thing, he’ll want us to wear uniforms. I wonder why he ever left the Guard, if he loved it so much.”

  “I don’t think it was his idea,” said Satterwaithe. “Leaving the Guard.”

  Ramakrishnan Bhatterji’s office on the engineering deck was not as opulent as his living quarters. There was little of the man himself evident there; not on the walls, not on the desk, not even, in a manner of speaking, in the man himself, for he was the sort who keeps his personal and professional selves separate. The prints on the wall were of force diagrams and fibrop circuits, not of young athletes. The holdfast bins contained components and subassemblies rather than fanciful sprays of flowers. And the books in the dog holes were parts catalogs, and not the sort of reading matter with which the private Bhatterji amused himself.

  Bhatterji sat behind the desk, turning a Ligon valve in his hands; not really studying it, not even looking at it, but only feeling the solid reality of it: the nubs of fasteners, the smoothness of the machined surfaces, the small holes and dimples. Tomorrow he would…The valve had nothing to do with his present task. It had been in a dog hole on his desk for a long time. He thought Enver Koch had had it there when this had been his office. Bhatterji wondered if that was what had happened to the rest of the hobartium. That it lay somewhere in a forgotten holdfast bin. He did that sometimes. He would pick something up and carry it with him and then put it down, and he would forget where he had put it and tomorrow he would go Outside…

  Carefully, he released the valve and watched it spin and tumble in midair. Was it possible to handle an object in free fall and not impart some degree of velocity to it?

  He and Miko…It was a four-hour job, if everything went according to plan. If everything fit together. If every connection was made fast, and fast in both senses. But something would go wrong. He stared at the slow gyre of the valve, remembering how Evermore had tumbled, boot soles over visor, in much the same way. He tried to picture the same of Miko and his mind shied from it with a horror surprising in its depth.