by Ben Jeapes
“How long before we can get the systems online again?” he said.
“A couple of minutes, sir,” Nichol said, not looking up as his hands moved rapidly over the controls.
“How long before we hit the rock?”
Nichol glanced up at the viewport. “A couple of minutes, sir?” he said.
After that there wasn’t much to say and no point in saying it, as they worked as quickly as they could to get the ship up and running again. The rock was getting visibly closer.
“We have control,” Nichol said at last.
“Then get us away from that thing!” Gilmore said.
“Aye aye, sir.” The weight came back again as Nichol brought the ship round again and fired the main engine. As Australasia slowed, Gilmore called up the display for a last view of the scuttler. It was approaching the rock’s terminator, out of the light of the sun and Australasia’s dying flares, and would be invisible again in a few more moments. He glared at the smaller ship in a white fury: okay, they weren’t taking any chances with this maniac who played chicken with asteroids and spaceships, but a torpedo-
Then Gilmore saw it and his eyes widened in horror.
“Scuttler, pull up!” he yelled. “Fire everything and pull up!”
The scuttler saw it too and started to manoeuvre, but too late. The mountain that had been waiting on the rock’s dark side loomed ahead, carried round by the rock’s natural rotation. The yells over the radio belied the apparent calm dignity with which the scuttler ship met its fate. The mountain reached out for the black ship and stroked it with a rough tentacle of rock. Over the radio came screams and the sudden, terrible roar of explosive decompression which stopped just as abruptly as it began.
“Oh, Christ,” Nichol murmured. On the displays, small fragments of the scuttler floated gently out of the cloud of vapour, some moving off into space, some bouncing featherlike off the rock’s surface.
“Match orbits,” Gilmore muttered. “Get a team down there.” Returning to port could wait a bit longer: it was possible, just possible someone on board had been suited up, and their suit hadn’t been punctured by debris, and ...
It wouldn’t have happened, but it was possible.
- 2 -
26 March 2149
The foreshortened perspective of space made UK-1 look only a few feet away from Australasia. It always seemed like just some other ship or station and Gilmore still had to make the necessary adjustment with his eyes and senses to appreciate just how big it was. It was the largest spaceship ever built – seventeen massive wheels in space spinning around a common axis. The last redoubt of the exiled House of Windsor.
“Engineer to flight deck. The engines are powered down,” said a voice from the engine room.
Gilmore thumbed the contact to make the return message. “That’s exactly what it says on my display here, Mr Loonat, but thank you for the courtesy.”
“You’re welcome, Captain.”
Australasia was coasting on its own momentum, a minnow to UK-1’s whale, as grapples reached out to snare it and drag it into its cradle on the stationary docking strake that ran the length of the great ship. Then HMS Australasia was safely docked at its home port and another patrol was over.
The satisfied smile vanished from Gilmore’s face as he caught his reflection in the panel in front of him – just a dim image but he knew too well the resigned look of gloom that tended to be his expression of default. A long-ago love had told him that his face was ‘fragile’ and that his eyes seemed larger than usual, which gave them more emotion and hence made his thoughts easier to read. The sad thing was, she had meant it as a compliment. He had been wary of showing his thoughts through his too-large eyes ever since. Thoughts were a dangerous thing to show.
“Ship secured, sir,” said the pilot of the watch.
“Fine.” Gilmore sat back in his couch. “Let’s take a look at our neighbours.”
It was something he usually did, just to see which old friends might be in the vicinity. Several other ships of the Royal Space Fleet was docked as well: two liners, some freighters and a couple of sweeps.
And a Rustie ship – not one of the seven starships of the First Breed that had burst into the solar system nearly two years ago but a smaller, interplanetary job. At first sight it was unremarkable and not obviously alien, but gradually you realised that the proportions were all wrong. It was built for a race that thought humans were too tall.
Gilmore had never caught Rustiemania and privately wished they had never come. They were going to share the secrets of their ships and (everyone else hoped) the rest of their tech. Soon there would be no room for an average ship’s captain like him, raised on the old ways. Sail was giving way to steam all over again.
“The overhaul team asks permission to come on board, sir.”
“Fine.” Australasia – Gilmore was still finding it hard to accept – had been fired at with a nuclear weapon: it needed the once-over by a better team of engineers than he had on board to check for damage from heat or radiation.
Even more annoying was that he suspected the Admiralty were delighted one of their ships had actually been fired upon. ‘Torpedo’ was probably too grand a word for it – a nuclear bomb tied to a small booster engine, obviously with thrusters so that it could alter course to a certain extent but still far from being a proper guided weapon. Crude, no doubt, compared with what was to come. If he had been quick enough, he could have hit it with the ship’s laser and that would have been the end of the threat.
But that wasn’t the point. Gilmore had heard rumours of space weaponry being developed in secret, as space gradually lost the neutrality it had enjoyed for two hundred years and human interests took over. And now it had happened. Someone had fired a torpedo in anger. He had been ordered to send on every scrap of data from Australasia’s sensors relating to the incident, as well as make a separate report giving his own impressions, and he had no doubt where all that data was going: straight into the Admiralty’s own weapons development programme.
“Dispatches are ready for downloading, sir,” said the comms officer.
“I’ll take them in my cabin.”
“Very good, sir.”
As Gilmore airswam down Australasia’s central passage towards his cabin a snippet of conversation drifted out of the wardroom:
“Hey, you know there’s Rusties in town?”
“Come to see His Highness, I suppose-” That was Adrian Nichol. He stopped when he saw Gilmore looking in. “Afternoon, sir.”
“Carry on,” Gilmore murmured. He turned to go. “Oh, and the king is His Majesty, Mr Nichol. Worth remembering.”
*
Gilmore sat in his cabin, but he was looking into infinity and seeing the Ark Royal at the end of it.
The ship wasn’t even in service yet and was already a legend in the Royal Space Fleet. State of the art, fast and manoeuvrable, with systems a generation ahead of any other human-built ship in space. Word was that she wasn’t even an official Admiralty project but was funded by the king, which immediately made her ten times more interesting. The king kept a number of privately funded projects going all the time, with varying degrees of secrecy: sometimes they would produce something beneficial and the product would be released into the public domain; sometimes word of the project only got out in the form of rumours.
But what did the king want the Ark Royal for? There was one obvious answer, even though it hadn’t been confirmed officially, and if it was true it meant-
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
Hannah Dereshev stood in the entrance to his cabin. Gilmore smiled and beckoned her in. He was holding an aide in his hands, carefully not letting the display point in her direction.
“Yes,” he said. “I mentioned the Ark Royal a while back-”
“Yes, sir, I-”
“Please,” Gilmore said, holding up a hand. “I don’t want your decision yet. For a start, I’m convinced they’ve got the wrong Captain Gilmore.”
<
br /> “There aren’t any other Captain Gilmores in the Fleet,” Hannah said. “I checked.”
“Whatever. Anyway, I want you to see this first.” He passed the aide over and watched her eyes widen. “Congratulations, Number One.”
She couldn’t take her eyes off the aide and the words it was displaying. A corner of Gilmore’s mouth turned in a smile when he remembered the first time he had received a similar message: bald and uninterested, but oh so important. It had been one of the dispatches waiting for them when Australasia returned to UK-1.
‘You are instructed to take command ...’
“It’s the Antarctica,” she said. Her first command, and promotion to lieutenant commander with it.
“The Earth run.”
“That’s right.”
“You’ll want Samad as Chief Engineer?” Gilmore said.
She smiled broadly. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Hannah was married to Samad Loonat, Australasia’s chief engineer. The two of them hired out their joint services to the space lines: it was a common means for married couples to get around the long separations of space travel. Where Hannah went, Samad went.
And where Hannah was going was one of the Royal Space Fleet’s freighters, shipping goods between Earth and UK-1. Definitely one up from a sweep ship like Australasia. Gilmore had been there once.
“I’m glad for you,” he said.
“Mike-”
“No, I am.” And he was. Hannah deserved better than him.
She looked at the display again, then slowly raised her eyes to his. “Getting back to the Ark Royal ...” she said.
“What about it?”
“Do you know anything more than that?”
“Not yet. I’m ordered to report to the palace once I’m done here.”
“The palace? Not the Admiralty?” she said.
“Correct. I’m going to hear it from the horse’s mouth.”
“Can I give you my decision when you know more about it?” Hannah said.
Gilmore smiled. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he said. However much he wanted her as his first officer, he wanted her to make the decision fully informed.
“And I might not get the choice anyway,” she pointed out. “I’m ‘instructed’ to take command.”
“If I’m to be captain of Ark Royal,” Gilmore said, “I’ll be doing the instructing.”
*
Being inside UK-1 was meant to be like being back on Earth. The laser images projected on the ceiling gave the feeling of the infinite vault of a real Earth sky. Live flora and even fauna were loose in the open areas, all native to the British Isles. The air had a clean, piney smell which Gilmore always felt to be tacky, being so blatantly artificial.
His legs were wobbly: he had been on a two month patrol in a ship without a centrifuge, and working out in the ship’s gym only just kept muscular atrophy at bay. Now those wobbly legs were trying to carry him through a crowd, which he hated at the best of times, and his eyes were fixed firmly ahead, trying to navigate a passage through the jostling people. In this way he almost stumbled over a cluster of three Rusties.
They were gazing into a shop window, for all the world like tourists out on a buying spree. Gilmore fought to regain his balance and suddenly he discovered he wasn’t quite so uninterested in the stumpy, four-legged creatures after all. Still only a tiny percentage of people had seen one in the flesh and until now he hadn’t been one of them. He tried to look at them without staring.
“Mike!” A powerful hand slapped him on the back and drove the breath out of his lungs. “How are you?”
“Hello, John,” Gilmore muttered after a couple of breaths. “Have you seen the Rus-”
“Yeah, yeah, aren’t you bored of them?” John Chase was a large man in all directions. He and Gilmore had started in space together but Chase had shot ahead and now, while Gilmore was called a captain by virtue of commanding a ship, Chase was a captain by rank. And that meant he was able to draw Gilmore away from the three aliens and carry on chatting, and Gilmore couldn’t do a thing about it except to cast a final look back as the Rusties were swallowed by the crowd. “Heard the darndest thing about them,” Chase continued. “Did you know they make their ships out of pottery?”
“Yes,” Gilmore said. A plastic-ceramic compound, to be accurate, but not ferro-polymer, like the ships made by humans.
“Say, Mike ...” Chase looked about them and drew him to one side. “Rumour says you’ve been given command of Ark Royal. That true?”
“I’m on my way to the palace now,” Gilmore said hopefully. Chase drew back quickly.
“Then why are you talking to me? Get on, Mike! I’ll catch you at the Captain’s Club.”
He backed away into the crowd and Gilmore gratefully headed for the transport tube.
Strap hanging on the way down to the palace – the colloquial name for ‘F’ wheel, the sixth wheel of UK-1, which was occupied exclusively by the king, his family and staff – Gilmore pieced together his brief impression of the Rusties. Quadrupeds, the largest of them coming up to his chest. Flesh covered by a ruddy, fuzzy substance that could be hair, could be feathers, could be something with no analogue on Earth. It was the colour of oxidised iron and even close up it really did look like patches of rust flaking off the creatures. Now Gilmore thought about it, he could remember a smell which he realised had been coming from the aliens. It was as if they had splashed on too much aftershave: not displeasing but not pleasing either.
The jokes about telling them apart weren’t fair: he had seen they were all of slightly different sizes and shapes. The only identical thing about them was the translator units hanging around their necks. They also had harnesses around their necks and over their bodies, on which hung things that might have been tools or decoration or both, which were as varied as human clothes.
And that was the sum of Gilmore’s impression of the aliens. He thought dark thoughts about John Chase, a man so accustomed to them that he thought they were old hat, but he shook the thoughts away as the tube reached ‘F’ wheel. He still had his appointment with the king and, if His Majesty had in mind what Gilmore suspected, he was going to see a lot more of the Rusties than John Chase ever would.
- 3 -
27 September 2148
‘This is a chance for both our species to make a fresh start. We of the First Breed hope that you will take it.’
The entire text of the Rusties’ invitation was burned into his mind: he had memorised it and looked at it backwards, forwards, left to right, right to left and upside down.
They wanted something. Nothing was so simple, so straightforward as the invitation made out: life wasn’t like that. In the opinion of R.V. Krishnamurthy, life was far too short for riddles and far too short for being expected to answer them. He believed in taking the simplest solution, and with solving riddles the simplest solution was to ask someone already in the know. This was precisely what he expected to do here, in this remote lodge in the Himalayas, with no one as yet but his loyal assistant and 20 elite NVN soldiers for company.
“We have them on radar, Excellency.” The speaker was a slim, nervous man in his mid thirties – twenty years younger than his master.
“Thank you, Subhas,” Krishnamurthy said.
Subhas Ranjitsinhji was one of those people who was permanently making Krishnamurthy ask himself why he tolerated them. And yet tolerate him he did: the man had been by his side for years. Ranjitsinhji could handle Krishnamurthy’s network of spies and informers, and all the other fiddling but necessary details that frankly bored his master. A useful subordinate and occasionally a handy scapegoat or just plain kicking stool.
Krishnamurthy deliberately did not get out of his chair but turned another page in his book. A shame about the appearance he had to keep up, he thought, because outside the great studio windows of the lodge the view of the Himalayas gleaming in the sun was stupendous. He had spent many happy holidays here and he was well aware of
its isolation, so when he had heard that a party of Rusties visiting Katmandu wanted to look at Everest ...
Now he could hear the engines of their flyer, echoing along the valley. He slowly put down his book and got up, stretched and wandered over to the balcony. Someone handed him a pair of binoculars and he put them to his eyes. His paid-for, tame pilot was flying down this particular valley with no questions asked, which was as well because the man would have taken much more persuading if he had known about the bomb.
A puff of smoke and flame burst out from one of the flyer’s engines and the whole craft yawed. Krishnamurthy set the binoculars to autofocus and followed the trail of smoke down, holding the plunging flyer in the middle of his circle of vision. At the same time the noise of the explosion reached them in the lodge, and the sound of the tortured engines that were trying to hold the flyer up.
“Recovery team, stand by,” said the NVN major.
The flyer came down onto the valley floor in an exploding cloud of smoke and sparks and dust. It skidded along the ground, still wavering from side to side, ploughing out a scorched furrow behind it, until it slammed sideways into a boulder. It tilted up and for a moment looked as if it might somersault over, but then it fell back down and settled right way up with a mighty crash. It was directly below the lodge on the floor of the valley, two hundred yards away. It couldn’t have been better.
The recovery team was already scrambling down towards it. Much as he regretted it, Krishnamurthy turned away from the scene – image was everything – and returned to his chair. “Time to finish my chapter, I think,” he said. “Get the ski masks ready.”
Armed men in masks stood around the mangled four-legged form on the floor. Krishnamurthy had ordered that only one survivor be left but it looked as if he had been lucky to get even that one. The flyer had come down more heavily than intended.