Linesman

by S. K. Dunstall

  Who would know? If you fell four thousand meters, you wouldn’t live to say whether it was fun or not. Ean thought it might be a long thirty seconds. Rather like when he went into the void, but at least he knew he’d come out of the void eventually.

  “Most people start off alone, but sometimes you meet up with others on the track. That’s where I met Minerva.”

  “Your wife?” Governor Jade asked, and Ean thought from the way she said it that Shimson’s wife was more famous than he was.

  “Yes.” Shimson’s smile showed he was still fond of his wife. “We had a stand-up fight the day we met, and we’ve been fighting ever since.”

  “When did you decide to turn back?” Ean asked.

  “Oh, we got to the top. It’s the most beautiful place you can imagine.” He smiled again. “We argued about whether we were going to jump or not, then we turned around and came down again.”

  “I’m glad you came down again,” Ean said.

  “So am I, Linesman, so am I.” Shimson looked at the panels again. “Anyway, that was my brush with the lines.”

  Maybe. Maybe not. Ean looked at Abram and Katida but didn’t say anything. They must have known; otherwise, they wouldn’t have invited him. He took a deep breath and started to explain some of the line functionality as he knew it.

  “Everything’s based on the lines. See, here, the strength of the lines denote the strength of the ship. That’s the Lancastrian Princess,” waxing strong. “The media ships,” not quite as weak as they had been in the lower lines, for Helmo had sent his engineers out to them. “And the Gruen and the Wendell.” Both of them sad, lonely sets of lines right now. Ean looked away, feeling guilty. The lines were still strong, especially the Wendell, but there was no mistaking they were missing something. Their crew.

  There were other ships on the display. The hundreds of sightseers, getting as close as Abram would allow them. He pointed out the Gruen and a nonfleet ship to Abram. “Can you see any difference between those two?”

  “Not at all,” Abram said. “Can you?”

  “That’s the Gruen.” Ean could tell from the way line eleven claimed it as its own. As for the other one, he didn’t even know how to find out. He could identify its song—tired and old and wanting to retire—which he thought came from the captain rather than the ship itself. The lines were in reasonable condition although maybe someone should look at the higher-level lines. The higher-level lines on a lot of ships needed work.

  Radko would have been handy, to tell him how he might have identified it. She always knew how to point him the right way.

  He looked at the points on the display and had no idea how to identify any of the non-Eleven ships.

  “It looks like a regular starfield,” Abram said. “Sort of.” He took out his comms and brought up his own miniversion of it. “Depth is not displayed as we understand it, I think.” He showed his comms to Katida and Helmo. “I wonder if they’re displaying their third dimension another way.”

  “Or if they’re displaying it in more than three dimensions,” Helmo said.

  There were five dimensions. Length, width, depth, time, and the void. “Like in the void?” Ean asked.

  Katida put out a hand to the display. “You can hear it. You can feel it. Maybe they’re displaying depth through another sense. Like sound.”

  “But the strength of their lines is the sound,” Ean said.

  “Maybe.” Katida consulted Abram’s comms and compared it to the starfield displayed. She checked the comms again, then pointed to a strong line close to the one Ean hadn’t been able to identify. “Which one is farther out?” Tired, old, ready-to-retire or the new ship, she meant.

  Ean pointed to the new ship. It wasn’t something he could have explained. The lines told him it was farther out.

  “Exactly.” She showed Abram and Helmo, who nodded. “Strong lines, for that is almost certainly Qarro’s ship.” Her eyes gleamed suddenly. “I wonder if you could find out for us.”

  “Let’s not try it now,” Abram said hastily. “Ean would probably sing it into the Eleven’s fleet. Try explaining that to Qarro.”

  “Try explaining that to the Alliance,” Helmo said. “It would be taken as an act of war.”

  “Pity,” Katida said.

  “I might not even have been able to contact it,” Ean said. “It has to be close enough for me to talk to it.”

  “Not even through line five?”

  “I still need the other lines. All of them.” At least, he thought he did.

  “Hmm,” Katida said.

  Abram’s comms beeped discreetly. “We’ve fifteen minutes before we need to start back,” he said. “Can you show us the weapons, Ean?”

  Ean wasn’t sure if it really was fifteen minutes or if he’d done it to divert Katida. He sang the request, and the screen displays changed to the pulsing bars of light. “This is the weapons system.”

  “Beautiful,” said Katida.

  “And we think these are the targets. Other ships.” Ean pointed to the fluxes that were roughly where the ships had been on the star chart.

  The Lancastrian Princess was strong again, the media ships weak. The Gruen looked like it had on their earlier visit to the Eleven, but the Wendell looked almost dead.

  Ean looked at it. “I don’t think it should be like that.”

  “Is that the Wendell?” Katida asked.

  “You can recognize it?”

  She shook her head. “Weapons system, you said, and I know Galenos stripped the weapons on that ship.”

  Ean looked at Abram, talking softly over one of the boards with Helmo. “Why?” And if he did it for one ship, why didn’t he do it for the other? The Gruen was still strong.

  “Piers Wendell will come back one day to collect,” Katida said. She looked at the lines on display. “How does it know there are no weapons there? Can it tell any ship’s arsenal?”

  It took a while to translate the question into line terms. By the time he was done, everyone was watching him expectantly, waiting for the answer.

  “I think,” because he wasn’t sure he understood fully, “it’s because they’re part of the Eleven’s fleet.” The lines were a persistent chorus of “our lines.” “They share information.” That seemed to fit in with what he knew of how line eleven kept the fleet together. “I don’t think they can tell what other ships have.”

  “It’s interesting they don’t seem to have a “big picture” view like we do,” Abram said. “When Gruen fired on the Eleven the last time you were on this ship, what happened? How did you know she had fired?”

  He’d heard her through the lines. “She gave an order.”

  “So you heard Captain Gruen,” Katida said. “But you don’t know how the Eleven identified it as a threat. Or even if it did identify it as a threat.”

  “No.”

  “Hmm.” She blew out her breath, Abram-style. “I think we have a little further to go before we can use this as a warship.”

  “That will come,” Governor Jade said. “Once we have a crew on board, they’ll work it out.”

  Shimson nodded.

  Abram glanced at his comms. “We need to head back,” he said.

  Ean noticed he didn’t comment on the multiworld crew.

  THIRTY-ONE

  JORDAN ROSSI

  THEY DIDN’T GET to leave immediately, for the council meeting Ahmed Gann had warned them about started while Wendell was making preparations. Orsaya was called to the council.

  “Wait here,” Orsaya ordered Rossi.

  For a change, he was happy to wait. Soon, Wendell would take him where he needed to be. When Wendell came into the apartments they’d been allocated, Rossi was sitting, sipping Lancian wine.

  “Where’s Orsaya?”

  “Council chambers.”

  The blood drained from Wendel
l’s face, leaving it white and stark. “The meeting they were talking about this morning?”

  “That’s the one.” How in the lines did Wendell do any commanding when his emotions were displayed so obviously on his face?

  Wendell went whiter, if that was possible. “How long since she left?”

  “An hour, maybe less.” Maybe Rossi should order some food to go with the wine. It was making him light-headed.

  Wendell snatched the glass out of his hand. “We need to get there. Now.”

  “What the?”

  “Hurry.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “You don’t understand,” Wendell said. “I heard about that meeting. She’s going to lose. No matter what she thinks she can do to beat Markan, she can’t. The council will vote to remove Orsaya from her position. They’ll put Markan in charge.”

  Wendell was as insane as the rest of them. “We can all see that coming.”

  “You still don’t understand.” Wendell pushed Rossi out the door. He was like Sale, deceptively strong for his build. “Once Markan is in charge, he’ll cancel the order to get Lambert. He’ll use House of Sandhurst to get the ship.”

  If Markan even realized there was a ship yet. Even Rossi still wasn’t convinced there was.

  “And if he cancels the order to get Lambert, I lose my chance to get my ship back.” And Rossi lost his chance to get back to the Eleven. “We need her to sign those orders before she goes into that council meeting.”

  Rossi put on a spurt of his own. “Why didn’t you say that?”

  • • •

  THERE were guards on the doors of the council building, barring everyone from entering. It was a big crowd, and there was a barrage of press drones. Obviously, someone scented news inside. Wendell walked straight past them. Half a block farther down, he swerved into a building with a big aircab sign, where he took a lift up to the rank and chose one of the smallest vehicles.

  After he’d paid for a night’s hire, he sat and did something on his comms.

  “I thought we were in a hurry,” Rossi said.

  “We are, but this is delicate work. Don’t talk.”

  Rossi didn’t ask. He didn’t want to know.

  Ten minutes later, the aircab rose, out of the ranks, up into the sky, where it circled the city, then seemed to drop down again into exactly the same place.

  “Didn’t work?” Rossi asked.

  “Of course it worked,” Wendell said, as the aircar came down gently in the rank at the top of the council building.

  There were guards up here, too, but they were expecting the cab, and the two of them. They checked their comms and waved them through. Wendell even made small talk with one of them. Rossi didn’t think they’d ever finish.

  “She’ll be in the visitor’s chamber at the back,” Wendell said in the lift down. “Which is lucky for us because we don’t want to have to walk through the councilors to get to her.”

  “You’ve obviously done this before,” Rossi said. “How many times?” He hoped Wendell knew what he was doing.

  “Never,” said Wendell cheerfully, and they stepped out into the corridor with more guards. “Message for the councilor,” he said to one of the guards. Rossi noticed he didn’t say which councilor. “I have to deliver it personally.”

  He showed his comms.

  Rossi wanted to know what the comms said. The captain had to be lying about never having done this before because he was too smooth not to have.

  “You know the drill,” the guard said. “Stay at the back until one of the stewards lets you through.”

  “Of course.”

  The guard let them in and closed the door behind them.

  They were too late.

  Orsaya was at the front of the chamber at the first speaker’s desk, with Markan looking daggers across at her from the other speaker’s desk. For a moment, Rossi thought Wendell would launch himself down onto the stage. He edged away slightly.

  Markan was speaking. “We know what that ship can do. We know what power it gives to the Alliance, and we can only guess what secrets they might learn from it. We already know it has a weapon more powerful than our worlds can build. We want that weapon. We need that weapon. And who knows what else is on that ship that could be used against us.”

  He looked around, making eye contact with every councilor. Rossi looked, too, and noted there were admirals up the back, in some of the visitor’s seats. They were familiar, like the scarlet-uniformed Centauran. These were the people who had been seated around Markan earlier in the day.

  “You heard Linesman Rossi earlier. Right now, they don’t know any more about the ship than we do.”

  Markan was preaching to the converted. Everyone in this room wanted that ship. Rossi could see already that they would do anything to get it. He crossed his arms over his chest, suddenly cold.

  Beside him, Wendell twitched as if he wanted to jump into the middle of the conversation. As for Orsaya, she didn’t even look as if she was going to interrupt. In fact, even though she wasn’t smiling, Rossi could tell she was pleased with the way things were going.

  “We have to take that ship from the New Alliance before they work out how to use it properly.”

  At least half the chamber nodded in agreement.

  “We know it requires linesmen to work it.” Markan made eye contact with the councilors again. “Ladies and gentlemen of the council, we all know that the only high-level linesman the Alliance has on call is faulty, whereas I, we—”

  “I wouldn’t say he’s faulty,” the scarlet-uniformed Centauran said. “He’s damned good, in fact. At least our people think so.”

  If looks could impale, the Centauran would have been speared, particularly as some of the other people in the room were nodding.

  Markan took a moment to recover, and when he spoke, his voice was slightly more clipped, but he managed to smile. “Nevertheless, Lambert is only one linesman, while we, with the support of House of Sandhurst, have a third of the top-level linesmen.”

  “Most of whom are nonfunctioning right now,” interjected Orsaya. “The only—”

  Markan overrode her. “The linesmen recover once they are removed from the confluence. Jordan Rossi proved that today.”

  How dare Markan drag him into this when he had so obviously snubbed him earlier.

  Markan’s voice firmed and echoed around the chamber. “Members of the council, I say to you. We need that ship. We need it before our enemy learns how to control it. We must attack now to acquire it, for without it, we sit waiting to be annihilated at the Alliance’s whim.”

  He got a standing ovation for that.

  “We cannot afford to wait, as Admiral Orsaya here is asking us to do. We cannot afford to give the Alliance a weapon that will allow them to win this war.”

  “It’s only a weapon,” Wendell muttered to Rossi. “Wars are won by people, and by the decisions they make.”

  The comment was lost under the cheers from the council.

  A councilor wearing a sash with the same purple markings as Admiral Markan’s stood up. “I would like to put a motion to the council. I would like to propose that the council stops mucking around and finally takes control of this war. I would like to propose that we place Admiral Markan in charge of retrieving this ship and that we ask that he does it immediately.”

  Ahmed Gann’s clear voice rang across the chamber. “Even if it means that we are declaring war on the Alliance?”

  “We are at war in all but name now,” the Centauran admiral said.

  “Councilor Gann,” the Roscracian councilor said, “everyone knows your reluctance to bring this thing to outright war, but war is inevitable. If we don’t act now, the Alliance will control the timing with that ship of theirs. One might almost say that you are helping them by holding us off.”

 
“Because of the ship?” Gann asked. “You say”—and he held up his hands to silence the councilors. It was a measure of the respect they accorded him that they quieted and let him speak—“that what you want right now is the ship. You are prepared to initiate hostilities to get it. Why?”

  “Why—” The word practically burst out of Markan’s mouth. “We’ve just spent the last hour debating—”

  Gann held up his hand for silence again. “I am not denying the logic of your argument, Admiral Markan. I am not denying I want an alien ship as much as you do. What I am asking is why precipitate a war we don’t know we can win for a ship that’s in enemy territory when we have another alien ship here, in our own territory, that we can collect without firing a shot.”

  The silence was absolute. Someone coughed and smothered the sound hastily.

  “Admiral Markan, I have known about this second ship for days, and I am not even on the war panel. You are.”

  Rossi imagined he heard the swallow of the water as the cougher took a mouthful. He definitely heard the soft thunk as the glass went back onto the table.

  “If you knew this already, Admiral Markan—and you must, for after all, are you not part of the war panel—then why are you still pushing us toward fighting the Alliance right now? I ask myself what could you gain? Destabilization of the Alliance? Or destabilization of Gate Union?”

  Fergus Burns had once said, “Never cross Ahmed Gann. He has a way of turning defeat into victory.” Maybe he’d been right.

  “That’s absolute nonsense,” Markan said, but he was drowned out by one of the councilors at the back calling out, “If you’re so certain there is a ship here, Gann, produce it.”

  “That is what we were trying to do.” Gann looked at Markan. “Is that why you insisted on this council being called so hastily, Markan? Because once everyone knew about this ship, your arguments would be useless.”