Starliner

by David Drake

  Commander Kneale in his white uniform appeared at the main gangway. A Szgranian fired a machine-pistol in the commander's direction. The burst may have been aimed to miss, but several of the little bullets whanged and howled off the bulkheads of the Embarkation Hall.

  This was going to be an international incident—particularly if some of the Empress's crewmen got into a gunfight with the Szgranian escort. Rawsl and his confederates didn't care in the least.

  If Ran had thought it would do him any good, he might not have cared about an open firefight either. All it would do was get good people killed, though. The Empress of Earth wasn't a warship with external weapons. The Szgranian warriors outgunned anything available from the starliner's arsenal. If there was enough ordnance flying around, Ran wouldn't survive long enough for Rawsl to cut him into collops.

  How Lady Scour would react to the event was an open question. Ran's bet was that she wouldn't deign to notice it. As mistress of Clan Scour, she had the right to do anything she pleased; but her evening of bestiality was no matter for pride, even to her overmastering will.

  Anyway, Rawsl and his confederates wouldn't care if their mistress had them flayed alive. They would have served their honor and their clan's.

  A warrior poked his sword a calculated distance toward Ran's buttocks. The Szgranian didn't want to kill Ran—that was Rawsl's perquisite. But if the human wouldn't go to his death willingly, then he would be thrust to it in a welter of his own blood.

  Instead of waiting for the pricking blade, Ran leaped on top of the palanquin. Spectators cackled with delight. Rawsl stepped back and spread his swords wide. If Ran tried to overleap the Szgranian, the blades would come up and cross through his body, cutting the human into three segments while he was still in the air.

  Someone switched off the Empress's external lighting.

  "Down!" cried Wanda Holly as she rose from the edge of a shanty behind the circle of Szgranians. She pointed a broad-mouthed weapon.

  Ran jumped off the end of the palanquin, putting himself as far as he could from Rawsl and the warrior who'd approached to prod him forward. Intense light hammered through Ran's closed lids and the flesh of the forearm he'd thrown across his eyes.

  Szgranians screamed. Swords dashed together, and a warrior emptied his automatic rifle in a single long burst. It was God's own mercy that one or more of the plasma weapons didn't belch nuclear hell as well.

  The throbbing pulses stopped. Ran was flat on the ground, though he didn't remember hitting it. Szgranians sobbed and bellowed.

  "C'mon, c'mon!" Wanda shouted. Her right hand gripped Ran's arm to guide him as he stumbled to his feet.

  She wore the padded, dull-colored overgarment of a Szgranian commoner. She wouldn't pass for a local if anyone looked carefully—but no Szgranian of rank would look carefully at a commoner.

  The nerve gun and powerpack slung to Wanda's breast weighed forty kilos. Ran didn't see how she could carry it and move so quickly. The weapon projected light pulsing at critical neural frequencies. These differed for various species—for humans and the great apes, it was just under seven and a half Hertz—but at some frequency, any chemically-based nervous system could be stimulated to dump neurotransmitters wildly.

  Hundreds of Szgranians, many of them armed, had gone simultaneously psychotic. Most of them still writhed on the ground, their limbs locked into pretzel shapes that might mean broken bones. One warrior chuckled as he stabbed himself repeatedly in the abdomen. His daggers pumped in sequence like the pistons of a reciprocating engine.

  The Szgranians facing the Empress hadn't been spared either, because the light had reflected from the starliner's gleaming hull. An arc of servants sprawled where bullets had cut them down, and a warrior was pounding his own feet to pulp with the heavy tube of his plasma discharger.

  "You were waiting here?" Ran gasped. He'd scraped the hell out of his right palm and elbow. They felt cool from oozing blood.

  Wanda's face was a mirrored ball. She'd polarized her helmet visor to protect her from her own weapon, even though it was calibrated to the slightly higher critical frequency of the Szgranian physiology.

  "Don't be a damned fool!" she snapped. "I waited for you at the gate of the palace. You didn't think I'd let you get into something like that without backup, did you?"

  Commander Kneale and the two ratings from Ran's own watch grabbed the pair of them and helped them up the gangway. The submachine guns the three men carried clattered against one another and Wanda's nerve gun.

  "No," Ran mumbled. "I don't guess you would have."

  It was good to have friends.

  TELLICHERY

  Carnatica Port was a large, bustling and cosmopolitan city. The last point was underscored by the number of cases of beef, relabeled Calicheman mutton, which had been unloaded from the Empress's holds and trucked past Hindu temples whose courtyards abutted the spaceport. So long as lip service was paid to the planet-wide dietary laws, the business class which controlled Carnatica was willing to wink at foreign tastes—and to share them, it was whispered.

  The Trident Starlines offices filled the top three floors of a building just outside the spaceport reservation, overlooking both the port and the town. Commander Hiram Kneale stood on the palm-shaded roof garden. He was checking the Empress's manifest with a hand-held reader linked to the main unit beneath him instead of using a fixed terminal.

  A modern office building and a starliner both cut their occupants off from their surroundings. In the case of the starship, enclosure was a necessity. When Kneale was dirtside, however, he preferred to work in a more open environment.

  In the street below, electric-powered jitneys crawled through streams of pedestrians without the noise and hostility an observer would note in most cultures. Across the chain-link fence and alarm wires which surrounded the reservation, vans replenished stocks of tangibles aboard the Empress of Earth and more jitneys arrived with passengers and their luggage.

  The manifest in Kneale's hands quantified the unusual number of passengers embarking from Carnatica Port on this voyage. Kneale looked down on the foreshortened figures even now sauntering up the gangplank. His face was still, but his mind frowned.

  He didn't have to wonder whether some of the passengers were potential hijackers. He had to determine which ones were the danger.

  The door of the hydraulic elevator—chosen by the Trident design team because it could be locally maintained while lift/drop shafts could not—gasped open. Kneale turned, reflexively dimming the holographic manifest to hide it from observation.

  The commander expected to see office workers coming up to the garden for a break—though at midday, he hadn't expected to be interrupted. Alternatively, it might have been a Trident officer, bringing Kneale a message that no one trusted to put on a link from the starliner or the data bank below.

  The intruders were two passengers from the Empress of Earth—Wade and Belgeddes, whom Kneale recognized only because it was his job to recognize all First Class passengers. He assumed they were lost, or—

  "Ah, there you are, friend," said the tall one, Wade. "I see you're like me—always out in the open air if I can be."

  "They told us we'd find you here," said his plump companion Belgeddes, wiping his bald scalp with a handkerchief. "Mind you, I'd just as soon you stayed indoors where the temperature's at a civilized level. If God had meant us to swelter, he wouldn't have given us climate control."

  "Ah, do you gentlemen . . . ?" Kneale began curiously.

  "Have business with Commander Hiram Kneale, the First Officer, Staff Side?" Wade continued crisply. "Afraid we do, friend. It's about the passengers, you see. The ones we're taking on here, and no few of those who boarded at the past two or three dockings."

  "Dickie's been secret service, you see, laddie," Belgeddes added. He chuckled. "Maybe a dozen secret services, one place and another. To a feller like me, people are just people; but Dickie here spots the wrong 'uns as if he reads their minds."

&
nbsp; Kneale began, "Precisely what is it that you're concerned—"

  An intra-system freighter lifted off with an increasing roar which overwhelmed the end of the commander's carefully phrased question. Tellichery had a very considerable off-planet trade carried on its own hulls, though most of it was concentrated on asteroid and gas mining in the local system. Tellichery was building interstellar transports, though. One day the planet might rival Grantholm and Nevasa in self-born interstellar trade—

  Assuming Grantholm and Nevasa, or either one of them, survived the present conflict as a significant force in the human universe.

  "Your starship's a valuable property, Commander," Wade said as the sound of the freighter diminished to a background rumble. "Militarily valuable, I mean. There's some on Nevasa who'd look at her as a war-winning asset."

  "You could pack a division aboard her," Belgeddes said. "More than a division. Why, you loaded five thousand troops on a little Ivanhoe Line puddle-jumper on La Prieta, didn't you, Dickie?"

  "That was only to orbit and down again," Wade said, dusting his right collar tab with his fingertips. He made a moue of dismissal but caught Kneale's eye as he added, "A Trojan Horse sort of business, you know. Not much to it. The government was scarcely able to organize a fire drill, much less react to a rebel brigade seizing the capital."

  "Not a lot of heavy equipment on that little jaunt either," Belgeddes said as though he were making a critical distinction. "Still, Dickie understands this sort of business, don't you see."

  The spaceship's hammering motors had disturbed winged creatures from the fringes of the reservation. They rose sluggishly into the air, some of them carrying burdens.

  The native winged vertebrates depended on down-insulated skin for lift rather than feathers, but they had toothless beaks and filled the same econiches as the Terran birds which they so closely resembled. These had two-meter wingspans, and they ate carrion.

  Tellichery had been settled by a broad cross-section from southern India including Parsecs, Zoroastrians of Persian descent. These latter had continued their practice of putting the bodies of their dead on high towers. Tellichery's "birds" were more than willing to complete the disposal of the remains, as vultures had done for the Parsecs' ancestors on Earth.

  "Gentlemen," Commander Kneale said, "Trident Starlines and the government of Federated Earth will do all they can to ensure the safety of passengers at times of crisis like these. I myself am busy now, doing just that, and—"

  Wade spread his hands in prohibition. "Have it your way, friend," he said. "Shouldn't think of poaching on another man's preserve. But I figured it was my duty to say you've got Nevasan troops coming aboard, pretending to be civilians—and that there's some locals from Tellichery here who I wouldn't be a bit surprised were paid mercenaries. Near a hundred of the fellers, or I miss my guess. All they need is a few guns and they own your ship."

  Kneale said nothing. His eyes flicked between the two self-important passengers, who might simply have chanced across the truth while making up another tall story . . . or who might, just possibly might, be agents provocateurs in Nevasan pay, trying to determine what the Empress of Earth's crew knew and what precautions they were taking.

  "Like on the Thomasino, hey Dickie?" Belgeddes said with a chuckle. "You know, I never did understand why you decided to turn that one around. It was just a family argument, after all. The cousins and their gang would've set us down on Barak, as sure as the first lot."

  Wade sniffed. "I don't care to have some chap wave a gun in my face and tell me to stay in my cabin if I know what's good for me," he said. "Besides, we'd paid Captain del Rio for passage. It was him, not his cousins, that I was looking to to complete the contract."

  Belgeddes shook his head in amusement. "You just can't resist being a hero, Dickie," he said. "That's your problem."

  "Gentlemen," Commander Kneale said sharply, "I appreciate your concern, but I'm afraid I have business of my own to attend to if the Empress is to undock on schedule."

  "Enough said, enough said," Wade agreed with another lift of his hands. "Sorry to have troubled you, Commander."

  The two old men turned together and walked back toward the elevator. "One bribed sailor," Belgeddes said, ostensibly to his companion, "and the hijackers are armed—out in sponge space where Terra can't so much as whistle. Where's the Brasil, d'ye suppose?"

  "Now, now, Tom," Wade answered in an equally loud voice. "I'm sure that the commander knows a lot more than a couple old buffers like—"

  The elevator door dosed, amputating the word us.

  What Commander Hiram Kneale knew was that Bridge had identified 97 passengers as probable agents of Nevasan nationality or in Nevasan employ. That was too close to Wade's "guess" of a hundred for any responsible person to believe it was only a guess.

  What Kneale also knew was that so long as there were hundreds of Grantholm returnees aboard the Empress of Earth, the Nevasans could expect a full-scale battle if they attempted to hijack the starliner. And the Grantholmers had disembarked on Szgrane.

  The commander stared somberly at his vessel; considering, planning. Something cracked loudly on the pavers behind him.

  Kneale spun. One of the birds had dropped its burden onto the roof garden. The object lay between the Trident officer and the elevator.

  It was a human thigh bone, with shreds of dry flesh still attached.

  IN TRANSIT:

  TELLICHERY ORBIT

  ". . . please report at once to your assigned lifeboat," said the silky, synthesized voice as Abraham Chekoumian trotted along the corridor. Very few other passengers were still moving, at least here in the First Class section.

  "This is a drill," Bridge repeated through membrane speakers in the wainscotting at three-meter intervals along the corridor and in every cabin. "However, the vessel will not leave orbit until every passenger has taken their position. . . ."

  Chekoumian was in the Social Hall when the alarm sounded. Instead of going straight to his lifeboat, he'd detoured to his cabin to pick up his packet of letters from Marie. Just in case.

  ". . . in a lifeboat. Please report at once to your assigned lifeboat."

  The corridor walls, instead of showing restful land or seascapes, now surged forward in broad arrows overprinted with Bay 32, Bay 34, Bay 40. The fact that some bays weren't mentioned suggested to Chekoumian that while he wasn't the only passenger still delaying the exercise, at least some of the lifeboats were already loaded.

  A steward with a holographic data link waited at the branch corridor to Bay 32, Chekoumian's lifeboat station. Chekoumian turned toward him, following the arrow. The link zeeped as it compared the passenger's features with those stored within the ship's AI.

  "In here quickly," the steward called, though Chekoumian was already past him. "Quickly quickly, please."

  The lifeboat's hatch was broad enough for passengers to board six-abreast in stumbling panic. The interior fighting was dim compared to the bright corridor, but an illuminated yellow arrow slid swiftly down the central aisle to the only empty seat in the 50-place vessel.

  Gray faces stared at the newcomer from the occupied places. Many of the passengers carried bundles, quickly gathered from their cabins. Though the announcement had been clear that this was only an exercise, lifeboat drill was unexpected and an unfamiliar event even to experienced travelers.

  Chekoumian plumped into the empty place. The companion on his side of the aisle was a heavyset man with a sour expression, holding a disposable hologram reader.

  The lifeboats' seat pitch and width were minimal, since the little vessels were designed to accommodate as many people as possible and protect them against the shock of a hard landing. Chekoumian wriggled to settle himself.

  He bumped his neighbor. "Sorry," he muttered.

  The hatch closed from either end. One of the panels rolled with a singing noise where something rubbed.

  "That's all right," his companion answered, speaking Standard but with what Cheko
umian took to be a Georgian accent. "If they don't get us out of these sardine cans in another five minutes, though, I'll walk before I lift with Trident again. I thought I was treating myself!"

  "You're from Tblisi?" Chekoumian said.

  His eyes were adapting to the interior lighting. A sailor seated at the console in the bow carried on a conversation with the starliner proper. Apart from him, the lifeboat was a can containing passengers in four-abreast seating—and five in the last row, where the aisle ended.

  "You bet," his companion agreed, switching to Georgian. "Yuri Timurkanov, Gold Star Fisheries. You're from Tblisi too?"

  Timurkanov set his reader down on the armrest to shake Chekoumian's offered hand. There wasn't enough room. The reader clacked to the floor.

  "Abraham Chekoumian," the importer said. "And yes, from Tblisi, but I haven't been home in five years. I'm going back to be married."

  He bent to pick up the hologram reader.

  "Please?" a passenger nearer the bow called to the lone crewman. "When will we be able to leave, young man?"

  "Oh, don't bother with that thing," Timurkanov said. "It's last week's news-load from Bogomil. It was the only thing I had along when the alarm sounded, but I must have read it a dozen times by now already."

  "They tell me that the exercise should only take a few more minutes, madam," replied the crewman. He spoke loudly enough for everyone aboard the lifeboat to hear. "Then we'll be able to return to our business. Believe me, this isn't my idea of a good time either."

  "Tblisi news?" Chekoumian said as he poised with the reader in his hand.

  "Last week's Tblisi news," his companion said in a tone of mild protest. "Want it? Go ahead." He took the reader and ejected the data chip, which he handed to the importer.

  "I had to make a quick run to Tellichery to install a new manager at my outlet here," Timurkanov explained as Chekoumian inserted the news download into his own reader. "Half our exports are to Tellichery, you know. I came over on one of our cargo charters, but I decided to treat myself first class on the hop back."