Starliner

by David Drake

  "They shot three of my people out there on the hull when we dropped into star space," Swede added in a tone of reflective calm. "Not a lot we could do about it—in star space."

  He very deliberately spat toward the airlock. "In the Cold, those guns of theirs, they won't be worth shit."

  Swede's men were donning the suits sprawled on the deck. The starboard watch, off duty at the time of the attack, took their own gear out of the locker covering one wall of the room.

  As Lewis worked his limbs into the semi-rigid suit, he said, "I dreamed every day for a year about the time I'd get Reesler alone outside and put him right off the hull."

  "Got a suit for me?" Ran asked Swede.

  "Try Locker Nineteen," the watch leader said. "Albrecht's in the sick bay, laying on his butt as usual. Earache, if you can believe that."

  Lewis continued emotionlessly, "I'm really going to stick it to them bastards that shot Reesler before I got him."

  The engineering officer on duty during the attack stood at-ease, his hands crossed behind him, at the console ruined by a laser. His spacesuit, necessary because engineering control was often open to vacuum, lay on the deck beside him.

  "You don't want a piece of this, Crosse?" Ran asked as he closed the plastron of the borrowed suit. It wasn't a great fit, but it was better than the one he'd had to use aboard the Prester John ten years before.

  The engineering officer swallowed. "We're under strict company orders to do nothing that would endanger the lives and safety of the passengers, Mr. Colville," he said.

  "You bet," Ran said.

  He turned to the crewman who was handing equipment out of the locker. "I'll take an adjustment tool," Ran called.

  "Mr. Colville, I've never been able to stand sponge space!" Crosse said. "I—whenever I have to go out, I—I can't move! I ought to be in the bridge crew."

  "Best get out of engineering control, then," Ran said without great interest "We're going to void the room as soon as we drop into star space the next time."

  He took the telescoped rod the Cold Crewman handed him. It would lengthen to three meters when he slipped the joints as soon as he passed through the airlock.

  With the adjustment tool in his hands again, Ran no longer thought of the sidereal universe. Star space and the Cold. Star space and Hell—

  Crosse bolted from the room. Swede spat idly after him and closed the airlock hatch to the corridor.

  "How many d'ye figure they've got on the hull?" Swede asked Ran.

  Ran shrugged, then realized the crewmen watching him intently couldn't see the gesture beneath the hard torso of his suit. "Maybe eight," he guessed aloud. "One for each engine. I don't guess they could have more than that."

  He grinned, staring into the past with wide, blank eyes. "They must've been trained specially for this hijack. I never saw a Grantholmer on a Cold Crew, did you guys?"

  "There'll be eight less to see in a little bit," Lewis said. He giggled.

  "Listen up!" Ran said. He wanted to rub his hands together, but he couldn't do that through the gauntlets and it wouldn't look right anyway. He was in charge___

  The Cold Crewmen stared at him. Some looked angry; one or two might be friendly. Most of the faces held no more expression than the swirling cold of sponge space did.

  "We're going out there in about—"Ran continued. He glanced toward the console for a time check. The clock had been destroyed by the laser blast.

  Ran pulled off a gauntlet. "—a minute and a half," he said, using the bio-energized watch tattooed into the dermis of his left hand.

  He'd been very drunk when that happened, but he'd left it there as a reminder not to let something similar happen again. The watch kept Earth time, and Ran felt vaguely proud of himself for converting to ship's time without dropping a beat. "Nobody moves from the airlock area until we're back in the Cold. They've got guns, they'll kill us. Simple as that. In sponge space, they're our meat."

  He'd caught a glimpse of his own visage in the polished bulkhead. His face was indistinguishable from those of his men: empty eyes and a mouth as cruel as the seam the laser had cut through the console.

  "We don't know just where they're stationed on the hull," Ran said, "so everybody heads for his normal duty station. When we drop back into star space, move fast. Anybody who isn't wearing the right suit, he goes."

  He looked around. "Any questions?"

  Nobody spoke. Cold Crewmen weren't talkative, and there wasn't much to say anyhow.

  "Then close your helmets," Ran said, "and follow me."

  He felt a shiver as the Empress of Earth reentered the sidereal universe, bringing the interior of the starliner back into the same spacetime as the outer skin. You had to be experienced to notice it here, but out on the hull it was a difference as great as that between death and life.

  Ran locked his faceshield down and reached for the switch controlling the hull airlock.

  "Let's get stuck into them bastards," said Swede on the suit-to-suit radio. His voice was a growl like that of an avalanche headed for the valley despite anything in its path.

  * * *

  When the hullside lock opened, air banged out and the light within engineering control grew flat because there was no longer an atmosphere to scatter it. Ran waited reflexively for the buffeting to stop when the last of the air voided.

  He'd known people to start for the hull too fast and be carried on out before they got their safety lines hooked. If there was a bright side to the stories, it was that the victims died in star space instead of in the Cold . . . .

  The old skills were still with him. He moved fast as the windrush ended, so that Swede's hand on his shoulder was a companionable pressure rather than the shove it would become if the man at the head of the line balked.

  People did balk during crew changes. Usually not on their first watch, but at the start of their second or third, when they knew the Cold and knew exactly what was waiting for them when their vessel left the sidereal universe again.

  This wasn't a formal watch change, just a navigation check programmed before the hijacking. The outbound element was of twenty-one men rather than the normal eight of a Cold Crew on the Empress of Earth: the survivors of all three watches, and Ran Colville in the lead. There wasn't any time to lose if they were all to get onto the hull before the starliner inserted into sponge space again—

  And anyway, Cold Crews didn't waste a lot of time on people who couldn't do their jobs. If Ran—if anybody—blocked the hatch during a watch change, he went out anyway—and maybe too fast to hook his line at the high end.

  The Cold was an inhuman, dehumanizing experience. The men of the Cold Crews not only knew that, they bragged about it

  Ran took the ladder in two steps against artificial gravity, felt that fade in a familiar queasiness in the pit of his stomach as his torso lifted above the skin of the ship. He latched his line, one-handed because the adjustment rod was in his left gauntlet, and planted the magnetic sole of his right boot on the hull with a slap he could feel all through the stiff fabric of his suit.

  Ran Colville was going home again to Hell.

  The tracks to the Empress's eight engine modules were inlaid into grooves on the hull, rather than being paint which would be worn away by the scrape of men shuffling flat-footed toward their duty stations. Ran followed Track 3, because that had been his first station on the Prester John. Home again—

  The Grantholmers had no reason to put a guard at the hull side of the hatch. It was still possible that one of the soldiers-turned-engine tender had found the strain of the Cold too much and was coming in—dispirited but still armed.

  Ran stepped forward, pivoting his body to make up for his inability to turn his helmeted head to see sideways. As he moved, his hands worked the adjustment tool, locking both of the tube's joints into their extended position. There were no Grantholmers in sight.

  He'd told his men to stay bunched at the hatch until sponge space hid them from sight. Despite that, he stepped f
orward himself, just to the next staple—

  The Cold was coming. No one who had felt it could remain static and await its return.

  The stars of this portion of the sidereal universe formed a hazy blur banding the blackness at an angle skewed to the Empress's present attitude. The starliner was in the intergalactic vacuum which made up most of the real universe. Only Bridge and the vessel's data banks could turn this location into a waypost on the journey to Tblisi—or to wherever the hijackers planned to divert her.

  The Empress of Earth herself was a gleam little brighter than the distant galaxy, the reflection of light from millions, even billions, of parsecs away. The converted freighter which carried the hijacking party was a darker hint in the black sky. It must be very close, but distances in the void were uncertain without absolute knowledge of the other object's size.

  From the hatch, four of the Empress's engine modules were bulges above the starliner's smooth curve. Ran's objective, Engine 3, was on the "underside" of the hull, not visible from where he stood. The inlaid track, a centimeter higher than the surrounding skin, would take him there.

  He reached the next staple, twenty meters closer to his destination. He planted his boots, but he didn't bother to unreel his second line and set it before he hit the release stud. A command pulsing down the line opened the hook attached to the staple at the hatch opening.

  Ran caught the hook as it sailed toward him, a wink in darkness. He set it to the new attachment point and shuffled on. Men had been known to smash their own faceshields when they snatched the safety line toward themselves too quickly and didn't catch the heavy hook in the end of it.

  Two of the engine modules stood out above the hull to which they were joined by basket-woven wire. They were distanced from the skin to protect the vessel in the unlikely event a fusion bottle failed. The elevation also gave the engines wider directability than they would have had if mounted lower. At the moment, the two visible pods pointed thirty degrees to starboard of the starliner's nominal axial plane.

  Ran turned and looked behind him. The rest of the Cold Crew—his crew—had spilled out of the hatch and was moving along the hull. Some of the men were hidden beneath the massive curve.

  Ran walked onward. He reached the third staple. From that point, he could see all of Engine 7, the pod and strutwork almost down to the hull. A Grantholm soldier was locking in a fresh fuel connector with his adjustment tool. He was a tracery of highlights rather than a figure. The submachine gun slung across his back distorted the image still further.

  It was time. The Empress of Earth slid again into sponge space.

  On the one hand, everything was light; on the other, Ran was blind, stone blind, because the impulses tripping his rods and cones had no connection with the code which those impulses would have represented in the sidereal universe. He could see nothing, no thing. Not the hull beneath his feet, not the gauntlet which held his safety line.

  But he could feel the track against the side of his boot, and his hook snapped in a familiar way into the upstanding staple. Ran slid onward, with the three meters of his adjustment rod out before him.

  He had a long way to go to reach Engine 3, but he might meet a Grantholm soldier at any point in the track. Ran's first warning would be the shock of his tool's contact. If that happened, he would withdraw the rod to his arm's length, then ram it forward again.

  Ran knew from one past experience that he could strike hard enough to put the tip of an adjustment tool through a suit and half the body within that suit

  Ran was very well aware that the Cold Crewman following him was likely to do the same, even though the fellow knew there was a friendly on the track ahead. In the Cold, a mistake was something that got you killed. By extension, an action that didn't get you killed wasn't a mistake, or at any rate not a serious one.

  Another twenty meters, another staple. Ran unhooked and brought his line forward hand-over-hand instead of with a clean jerk as before when he could see the hook coming. When he was on with the Cold, he could sense motion within its flaring emptiness, but he'd been away too long to trust his instincts now.

  The chilling light flooded through his flesh and marrow. Even if he closed his eyes, he would see the swirls that were almost patterns. When he was in the Cold, Ran thought that the bubbles of sponge space might be alive, might be Life itself in the abstract.

  Might be God; but if they were, God was Siva the Destroyer.

  He had felt the Cold every night for ten years in his dreams, and now he was home again within its desolation.

  Another staple. Another. At the fifth point, Ran didn't bother to reconnect his line. It slowed him down and bound him to the universe of which his soul was no longer a part.

  At the fifteenth staple, Ran Colville reached down and it was there, the hook of another safety line, and he'd seen it in the glaring night before his gauntleted fingers fondled the curve, the catch.

  He released the Grantholmer's line manually. Apart of Ran's mind knew that he should have set his own hook, but his soul was one with a spacetime which hated the universe to which Mankind had been born.

  With the cunning of a hyena poised to tear the face off a sleeping woman, Ran took up the slack in the unseen Grantholmer's line. When he felt resistance, he gave a fierce left-handed tug.

  Through blind light as penetrating as a sun's heart, Ran saw the startled soldier lurching toward him, spinning; his limbs flailing, his tool flying off on a trajectory of its own as the man tried to grasp his slung weapon in a soldier's reflex.

  Ran's right arm cocked his adjustment tool like a javelin for throwing. In the event, he didn't bother to bring the tool forward in the smashing blow his intellect had intended. Instead, Ran pirouetted aside like a bullfighter.

  The Grantholm soldier slid past invisibly on a vector that took him clear of the starliner's curved hull, off into an alien eternity. The victim must be screaming, but radio waves propagated as oddly as light did outside the sidereal universe. If the man was heard at all, it would be as a ghost whispering in the ears of Cold Crewmen unimaginably distant in time and space.

  Ran Colville walked away from the track so that he would no longer be in the path of the crewman who followed him. There was nothing to do but wait, now, until the Empress dropped into star space and the Trident crew could return without danger from its own members.

  Nothing to do but wait; and to feel the Cold drink him in; and to listen to the unheard screams of a Grantholm soldier whose death was a living sacrifice for Ran Colville.

  * * *

  "Ran," the Cold said. He felt the word tremble through him. "Ran, come with me. Lift your right foot."

  His eyes opened. He stood in star space. The realization so shocked him that he flushed, and for a moment his skin burned as though he had been dropped into hot oil.

  "Ran," repeated the figure who held him. Their helmets were in contact, so Ran heard the words directly instead of through the radio link. "We're going in now."

  "How l-long do we have before the next insertion?" Ran asked.

  His voice cracked in the middle of the second syllable because his throat was dry. He must have been standing with his mouth open, hearing and seeing nothing, for—he couldn't guess for how long.

  Standing in the Cold, even though the Empress of Earth had returned to the sidereal universe at least once during the period.

  The suited figure holding Ran jerked away. "You're all right?" the voice said in amazement, through the helmet radio now. The voice was Wanda's. She must have been calling to him as she trekked across the hull, unheard until their helmets made physical contact.

  How long had he been mired in Hell?

  "I'm fine," he said, hoping that was the truth. "When do we reinsert?"

  Ran began a swift, skidding pace in the direction Wanda urged him. He didn't know where he was on the hull, didn't know the hull of the Empress at all because each ship is different. He was fully aware that his safety line dangled loose, and that Wand
a had loosed hers to fetch him from where he stood far from the tracks and staples.

  "Not until Bridge recalibrates," Wanda said. Their gauntleted hands, his left and her right, gripped, though the greater safety in the contact was spiritual, not physical. "And not until 1 bring you in. Commander Kneale promised that."

  "He's alive?" Ran said. His mind fought its way to the surface through layers of icy, flaring slush. Memory of what had sent him onto the hull was slowly reasserting itself through the smothering Cold.

  "He's alive," Wanda said. Her voice was detached. "We're all alive, mostly. They killed a steward, nobody knows why. We found him in Corridor Six. And there was a passenger with her children, two little boys. They were hiding behind the counter of the Paris Bistro on Deck A and the soldiers thought they were us. . . ."

  In the near distance, a Cold Crewman reset the nozzles of an engine pod manually. Delicate electronics failed quickly in sponge space, but men continued to do their jobs.

  A figure shuffled across the hull toward Ran and Wanda. It carried something long and thin, but even in dim starlight the object didn't appear to be an adjustment tool.

  "So they killed them, the soldiers did," Wanda continued in a voice as pale as the light of the distant galaxies. "And we killed the soldiers while they were looking the wrong way, Wade and Belgeddes killed them, and I did. And then we killed more soldiers."

  The third figure joined them. "Hold on to me," an unfamiliar voice directed over the helmet radio. "I've hooked six safety lines together. No point in having a problem when we've gotten this far."

  "Wade?" Wanda said.

  "The same," the radio agreed. Wade slung the object he carried, the huge rifle from Calicheman, and held out his hands to the pair of officers. "I'm afraid I've shot off all your ammunition, Mr. Colville. Seems to have done the trick, though. The Grantholm freighter is gone, eh what?"

  Ran looked up. He couldn't see the other vessel, but it could have been subtended by the Empress's greater bulk.

  "It pulled off because you shot at it?" he asked in amazement. He supposed the 15-mm bullets could do some damage to the thin plating of a colonial-built freighter—but not enough, he was sure, to cause a picked Grantholm assault force to abandon its mission.