Starliner

by David Drake

  "I've got my job," Ran continued, "and I'm good at it. And most of my duties . . ."

  He glanced back at the hologram of the starliner. He imagined the sullen splendor of sponge space wrapping the vessel and those on her hull, dissolving their souls and filling the psychic cavities with Cold.

  Wanda squeezed his hand.

  "Most of my duties," Ran said, "I like a lot."

  At the cafe ahead of them, waiters were beginning to serve plates offish and pasta as well as drinks. It was late morning in Bogomil, several hours behind ship's time.

  "I wouldn't mind some lun—"Wanda began. The rest of her sentence was drowned by excited shouts from those watching the news in the electronics store.

  The Trident officers turned, their faces pale and sickly in Tblisi's orange-touched sunlight They strode back toward the holograms.

  For a moment, Ran thought the Empress was the starliner filling half the huge projection while the newsreader spoke from the other side of the display. The vessel was deep in an atmosphere, but her landing outriggers were not deployed.

  "No, it's the Brasil," Wanda said, correcting her own similar misapprehension aloud.

  "What's happening?" Ran demanded of an old man wearing a horizontally-striped shirt and a straw hat squeezed shapeless by long use. The fellow had been watching the news when Ran and Wanda passed the first time.

  "The Grantholm-Nevasa war's over!" the local said. "It was going to be terrible for trade, just terrible. I'm in shipping, and I know that."

  The old man's eyes were bright with memories of the time when he had a life that required more than watching the news in a public place. That must have been years past.

  "Lin Van Thiet, formerly the Minister of Culture and now Interim President of Nevasa," the newsreader said, "urges all Nevasan citizens to cease hostilities and actions which might be seen as hostile by the government of Grantholm. The situation on Nevasa is difficult. Attempts to prolong the conflict can only lead to untold suffering for the survivors."

  "The Minister of Culture is running the planet?" Wanda murmured. "What on earth . . . ?"

  The image of the Brasil was blurred. That had the effect of making the picture more real to those watching. This was real data from a vessel accompanying the starliner, not a computer simulation.

  "Tblisi received a communications torpedo with the news," Ran said. "From Nevasa, it must be. Lin must be really serious about ending the war if he's sent direct messages to colonies this distant."

  "It's Nevasa, that's for sure," Wanda said. "Look at the sky."

  The Nevasan atmosphere fluoresced in dazzling sheets to swaddle the plunging starliner. The lenses recording the scene couldn't penetrate the fog of light, except to record the yellow-white glow of the .Brass's dense hull.

  "Casualty figures are still being assembled," the newsreader said in the tones of someone who can't really believe what he's seeing, "but it appears that damage to Nevasa City and the region around it has been extensive."

  "Christ!" said Ran Colville. "If she hit Nevasa City at orbital velocity, there isn't any fucking Nevasa City any more!"

  "Grantholm hijacked the Brazil and used her as a missile," Wanda said. She gripped her companion's left hand and squeezed till blood started from where her fingernails cut into the skin. "Ran, they killed—tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands of people!"

  "No," Ran whispered. "Grantholm didn't do that."

  The newsreader vanished. The image from Nevasa expanded to fill the display. The starliner's track was a cone of roiling pastels reaching toward the ground until it merged with the distance-softened sprawl of Nevasa City.

  "If Grantholm had taken the Brasil," Ran continued, "the Nevasans would never have let her get into planetary orbit. She had to be in Nevasan hands when she—dropped."

  The hologram image shuddered from atmospheric distortion. The display flashed indigo verging on ultraviolet, then white, and finally all colors as a lightning-shot bubble swelled across the surface of the planet. The impact of hundreds of thousands of tonnes hitting Nevasa at astronomical speed converted the contact surfaces to plasma and a huge additional volume to gas.

  "They were bringing the Brasil to Nevasa to be converted into a troopship," Ran said. He lifted Wanda's hand to his lips and kissed it gently to remind her of her grip on him. "As they would have done the Empress, if we hadn't dumped the hijack team—the Nevasan team—on Tellichery."

  "They lost control?" Wanda said. The bubble continued to swell on the display. Its rim was picked out by black specks, fragments weighing hundreds of tonnes splashing out of the impact zone. Many of them would reach escape velocity.

  "Yes," said Ran. "And I think I know how." He swallowed. "I want to get back to the Empress," he added.

  Wanda kissed the back of Ran's hand. Her tongue tasted his blood. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "Yes, let's

  go-"

  "The war's over!" the local man beside them repeated gleefully.

  * * *

  The walls of Commander Kneale's suite were set to show holographic scenes of Nevasa. The ceiling was a view (downward, disconcertingly) of the Empress of Earth descending onto Con Ron Landing, haloed by her squadron of tugs and the fluorescing atmosphere.

  The city nestled into the hills about the spaceport Large swatches of green interspersed the built-up areas.

  "Sit down, Ran," the commander offered from behind his big desk. He looked weary but composed.

  "No, I don't think I'll do that," Ran said harshly. "I heard what happened on Nevasa. To Nevasa."

  "Yes," Kneale said, "so did I."

  He stretched. "Do you have any suggestions about who could fill a rating's slot on my watch? One of my people—Blavatsky—she's leaving the company here to marry a passenger."

  He grimaced and shook his head.

  "Do you know how many people died down there, Commander?" Ran shouted, pointing up toward the image of Nevasa City. "How many died?"

  "Fewer than would have died if the war had gone on another ten years," Kneale said calmly, "as it might have done. But that's none of my business."

  Ran twisted his eyes away from the commander's face. On the right-hand bulkhead, images of Nevasan children gamboled on the floor of a narrow gorge while their parents watched indulgently. The whip-trunked native trees grew up both walls of the gorge and wove together at the top, filtering the sunlight to soft green without glare or shadows.

  The scene was a famous park, near Nevasa City. Probably too near Nevasa City.

  "Commander," Ran said as he sat/collapsed into the cushioned armchair on his side of the desk. "They were innocent people. Most of them were innocent."

  "If you want innocent, Colville," Commander Kneale snarled, "then think about the five passengers killed when those bastards tried to hijack the Empress! D'ye think it was any different aboard the Brazil?"

  Kneale stood up, clenching his hands together as though he was trying to crush something between his palms. His face distorted with anger and self-loathing. "Those five passengers were our business, yours and mine. And we failed them, Ran Colville."

  Ran gestured toward the bulkhead where he'd seen the crew of strangers installing equipment before the Empress undocked from Earth. "What's back there, Hiram?" he asked quietly. "Behind the kids playing and the false panel."

  "An autopilot," Kneale said. He sat down, looking surprised at having found himself standing. "With an override that takes precedence over the ordinary systems on the bridge. As you already guessed."

  Ran nodded. "And you would have done the same thing," he said. "Hidden behind the false wall of your suite and programmed the Empress of Earth to crash into Sonderburg on Grantholm. Or Nevasa City, whichever."

  "Not exactly," Kneale said emotionlessly. "I was told that when the ship had a full load of the troops from the hijacking planet, it would enter sponge space and never return. If that's really what the autopilot was programmed to achieve, then something went wrong."

 
He licked his tight lips. "It's possible," he added bleakly, "that government officials lied to me."

  He raised his eyes to the vision of the Empress lowering herself onto Nevasa in all her unique splendor. "There were provisions for the—officer in charge of operation to escape by lifeboat. I doubt Commander Cunha left the Brazil. I certainly would have ridden the Empress down if a similar—error—had occurred. If it hadn't been for you, Ran, and Ms. Holly; and some few others."

  "Sir," Ran whispered, "it could be a million people died. There were better ways. Earth could have sent a fleet to Nevasa. This was a government problem, not the company's."

  "Who do you think installed this equipment?" the commander snarled, thrusting an angry thumb toward the bulkhead's false innocence. "You know Federated Earth can't play galactic cop openly. The voters would never stand on it, and every ex-colony from here to the Rim would be up in arms at the idea."

  "They hijacked—"Ran offered.

  "Prove it!" Kneale retorted. "The Brasil is gone, the Empress of Earth would have been gone—prove which of the warring parties hijacked her. Or either of them!"

  "It'd have come out," Ran said. He rose and turned so that he didn't face the commander's fierceness. "They couldn't hide her—either ship—once they used her to ferry troops for an invasion."

  Holographic farmers worked terraced fields in the area of Bu Dop, across the planet from the steaming crater that was now Nevasa City. The embassy official he'd met . . . Susan. She was going to Bu Dop, she'd said.

  "And the guilty party would pay an indemnity to Trident or Consolidated, whichever," the commander rejoined. "And they'd release the passengers, probably, from some detention camp on a planet nobody ever heard of, where they'd have enough food and most of them would have survived. For years! And Federated Earth wouldn't take military action, because the villains had apologized, hadn't they? And it was all the former government anyhow. And—"

  Ran turned to face him. Kneale too was standing.

  "—they'd do the same goddamned thing again, and other people would, and star travel would never be safe for any peaceful purpose ever! Isn't that true, Ran Colville?"

  Ran licked his dry lips. "Yes," he said. "I suppose it is."

  He drew in a deep breath. "Who knew about this?" he asked.

  "I did," said the commander. "And you've guessed. One or two members of the Company's board of directors. A few people—very few—in the bureaucracy of Federated Earth. None of the elected officials."

  Kneale looked up at his ceiling image again. His tone softened. "The installers wouldn't have known what they were doing, though it's possible that some of them have guessed by now also. What I'm quite sure of . . ."

  He locked his eyes with Ran's again, and his voice rasped like the tongue of a lion. "What I'm sure of is. That as a result of Nevasa. Everybody in the galaxy knows or will know. That if you hijack a Terran ship, your planet will be gutted. And the government of Federated Earth will smile and go its wholly deniable way."

  "Oh, God, Hiram," Ran said softly as he kneaded his brows with his fingertips. "And Grantholm goes on, and . . . ?"

  "Nobody picked Nevasa City," Kneale said. "The Nevasans picked it, and—if the crash wasn't an autopilot error—it would have been Sonderburg except for what you managed to do. But there won't be a next time. That's what makes it worthwhile."

  Ran shivered. "I . . ." he said. His lips quirked in a smile. "There isn't really anything to say, is there? It's done. I guess I'll go now."

  "Sometimes quick ruthlessness is the gentlest course in the long run," Kneale said. His voice fell into a whisper. "Governments have to think about the long run."

  Ran reached for the latch plate. As he did so, his eyes strayed to the left, toward the image of children playing on the outskirts of Nevasa City.

  * * *

  "Want a drink?" Ran asked.

  Wanda was drawing figure-8 patterns with her index finger across the face of the autobar at their table. "Not here," she said.

  They were alone in the starliner's Darwin Lounge. On the walls, cartoon figures capered through skits illustrating evolution: the evolution of drinks, from rancid grape juice to the incredibly-complex cocktails in which the lounge's autobar specialized; the evolution of transport, from log float to the Empress of Earth herself; the evolution of living spaces, from cave to the Darwin Lounge. . . .

  The scenes were so funny, and so obviously non-serious, that "nobody could take offense at them"; though of course people did, several on every voyage, for reasons as diverse as they were uniformly absurd. For that matter, passengers had been known to complain about the rest rooms off the Social Hall, because the crossing patterns of the plaid decorative scheme "suggested Christian motives."

  A pair of stewards entered the lounge, noticed the two officers, and lowered their voices as they walked on through to the Carthage Salon beyond.

  "What I'd like to do," Wanda resumed, looking across at Ran and smiling fixedly, "seeing that we'll be laid over on Tblisi for an extra forty-eight hours so the home office can decide how to modify our schedule . . . ."

  She took a deep breath. "Is for us to rent one of the fishing cottages out at the head of Bluewater Bay. And spend the next while getting to know each other better."

  Wanda forced her smile broader. The tip of her index finger was white from the force with which she pressed at the autobar. "Is that clear enough for you, Ran?" she said.

  He spread his right hand flat on the table and pushed. "Didn't you hear what I said?" he demanded, "They deliberately crashed—"

  "Listen to me!" Wanda said as she covered his hand with her own. "I was there when they were installing the autopilot in the commander's cabin, remember? When we watched the Brasil—you didn't have to tell me what was going on, Ran."

  Ran shuddered. He wouldn't meet her eyes, but he turned his hand palm-up to clasp Wanda's. "And it doesn't matter?" he asked.

  "It's done," she said. "Whether it was a good idea or a bad one . . . and yeah, I think it probably was a good idea, the same as the commander does and you do. I'm just glad that it wasn't me who had to—do what was done."

  She clasped Ran's hand between both of hers. "Look at me, Ran," she whispered.

  He obeyed, giving her a wan smile. "I dunno, Ms. Lieutenant Holly," he said. "I'm not sure I'm tough enough for this business."

  Wanda laughed. "You're tough enough for anything you have to do," she said. "I'm paraphrasing somebody I trust on that. But our job is to get the Empress in on schedule, with happy passengers. Not to worry about—other people's jobs, that they've already done and we can't undo if we wanted to."

  She cleared her throat "And because we've done our jobs to the satisfaction of our superiors, we've got some time for ourselves. Which I want to spend with you."

  Ran lifted their knotted hands and kissed the woman's knuckles. "Wanda," he murmured, "look, it wouldn't . . ."

  "Look at me, Ran," she insisted.

  He met her eyes. "I've known my share of women—" he said.

  "Yes, I've noticed that," Wanda said drily.

  "—but they didn't mean anything, any more than I did to them. I—"

  "Are you really that naive?" Wanda asked. "That they were just having a bit of fun, because you were?"

  Ran shrugged angrily. "Look, that's my business. What's your business is that you—for pity's sake, Wanda, you're a friend of mine. And I don't fuck my friends."

  "Then who does that leave, Ran?" she responded softly.

  He straightened as though he'd been slapped. "Wanda," he said. "I don't want anybody to get hurt."

  She shook her head. "You can't control that," she said. "You're hurting people now with what you do. And you're smart, so you know that, whether you admit it or not And you're right, it's none of my business, except—"

  She squeezed fiercely at his hand. "Except that it doesn't have to be like that. You care about people or you wouldn't be so upset about what happened on, t-to Nevasa City. You can car
e about a person too, Ran."

  He chuckled. "I wouldn't bet on that," he said.

  "I am betting on it, Ran," she replied. She got to her feet and drew him with her. "Come on," she added. "It's an hour by ferry to Bluewater Bay, and that's longer than I want to wait."

  Ran slipped his hand around her waist as they walked out of the lounge. "I'm not much of a hand for fishing," he said in a neutral voice.

  Wanda laughed. "To be really honest," she said, "I wasn't planning to rent fishing tackle."

  The stewards, completing the post-landing check of the Carthage Salon, could hear the officers' laughter carol all the way down the corridor to the Embarkation Hall.

  THE END

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