“That’s right, they group into families on Soward,” Catherine murmured.
“That’s how the Cartel came into being,” Brant said. “Individuals identifying with groups, giving rise to an outsider/us complex.”
“Kemp left Soward and was reoriented, I suppose,” Bedivere replied.
“It’s amazing he was allowed to leave in the first place,” Catherine said. “If the Cartel is so powerful, they wouldn’t like one of their own leaving.”
“Perhaps he didn’t ask,” Brant said. “Maybe he left the same way he’s returning.”
“That would explain a lot,” Catherine said.
And so Kemp was invited aboard. Brant reported he had been tucked into his stateroom and Bedivere sent Kemp an invitation to the last meal of the day on behalf of the captain. They got busy with departure protocols and jump preparation.
Darwin’s gates were only three standard hours from the terminal at best sublight speed, including acceleration time. It meant the jump preparations had to be hurried but they had done this so often, even with Lilita mixed into the process, that there was little risk they would have to go through any expensive deceleration process at the gates because they weren’t ready.
The new factor in this jump was Brant. He asked for permission to watch the jump from the bridge and Catherine couldn’t think of a reason to say no. He stood at the far back of the deck, by the door and well out of the way of anyone’s work area, including Lilita’s dashboards and monitors along the back wall.
He didn’t speak. He was a model visitor, but even so, Catherine was very aware of him standing at the back and watching everything, because he didn’t simply watch. He absorbed things, like he had taken in the personality traits of all of them the first night aboard.
Bedivere seemed unaffected by Brant’s presence, but he was concentrating almost exclusively on the jump preparation and barely said anything, which was usual.
Catherine had learned to rely more and more on the AI to control most of the factors of the jump. They just had to ensure that the raw data being fed to it was pure and correct and as current as possible. Since acquiring the new Itinerary with its license to access current gate data, a lot of the stress of jumping had disappeared. If they were to return to the fringes, updates would cease and the sophisticated guesswork and recalculations would start up once more. In part, that was the reason why there was only one AI and a powerful one at that. They needed it to adjust for outdated gate data.
The jump executed without issue and when Catherine stood and stretched and turned, she saw Brant with a touch of surprise. She had forgotten he was there.
Lilita was chatting to him as he listened gravely and Catherine hid her smile. Lilita had found her next victim. If he would cooperate with her was open to question. Catherine had a feeling she would have to spend far more time getting to know Brant before she could begin to make a guess about what he might do in any particular situation.
Catherine rested her hand on Bedivere’s shoulder. She could feel the tension there. It would take him a while to relax after the stress of the jump and get back to normal. “I have some Soward chardonnay. I thought I’d serve it with dinner. Sort of a welcome-home gesture for Kemp. Come and join us.”
Bedivere looked up from the console, his eyes narrowed. She could see his thoughts were far away, but he made himself focus on her, then shook his head. “Not until I’ve checked everything.”
“You could do that from the table,” she pointed out. That was the explanation they gave the inquisitive to explain the sync link. Just two of them running a mid-sized cruiser would be impossible if one of them had to stay on duty on the bridge at all times. The sync link was a way to let Bedivere monitor the arrays and let both of them move freely around the ship.
“There’s an hour or so yet.” He tried to smile. “I won’t promise, but I’ll see.”
“It won’t be anything too grand,” she assured him. “I can already feel my bed calling. I think I’m going to sleep for twelve hours. I’m not up to a big formal sit-down, either.”
It ended up being one of the shortest first-night meals Catherine could ever remember. Bedivere didn’t show, which meant he was sleeping or still worrying over the flight. Kemp was unsettled and anxious and when he asked for a second time what the projected arrival date was, Catherine cocked her brow at him. “Bad news from home?” she asked.
“It’s…worsening,” he said. His dark eyes were troubled.
“We’re going as fast as we can,” Catherine promised him. “You should find a way to work off all that stress, Kemp, or this ship will start to feel claustrophobic inside a week. We have a well-equipped gym room, for instance.”
Kemp drew in a breath. “My apologies.” He tried to smile, his teeth looking very white next to his chocolate brown skin. For the rest of the meal he was polite and answered Brant’s questions gravely. Lilita preened in front of them and laughed loudly and often.
By the time Kemp stood and excused himself, Catherine was just as ready to call the day done.
“May I roam the ship?” Kemp asked her. “I’m tired, but I won’t sleep until I’ve used up some of the calories from this excellent meal.”
“Your biometrics have been registered,” Catherine told him. “Nothing you touch will work if it’s something you shouldn’t be touching. There are one or two doors that won’t open for you, either. That’s because it would be dangerous for you beyond the doors.”
“I understand and I appreciate the freedom you can extend.” He nodded at her, then bid Lilita and Brant a warm goodnight.
As Catherine headed back to her room, she wondered who of the three would end up with whom. She would have to monitor that. A jealous triangle wouldn’t make for a happy ship.
Three days later, she almost knocked Kemp over as he emerged from Bedivere’s suite and realized Kemp hadn’t picked either Brant or Lilita. He’d chosen someone else with whom to work off his stress.
Chapter Eight
“I understood that cancer inoculations were considered unnecessary these days,” Brant said, as Catherine set the dispenser for the right dose.
“The Federation thinks they are a waste of money, but their ships rarely deviate from the high traffic routes. The shielding on the Fed ships has been developed to the point where they’re impervious to any radiation you might find out here. You could detonate a dirty bomb right on top of their shields and the shields would barely warm up. Put your arm through there, please. Thank you.” She activated the dispenser and waited.
Brant nodded. “I have noticed that this ship is of a more classic era.”
“Is that your way of saying it’s old?”
He smiled. “I have only ever used Federation transport until now. My travelling was all quite legitimate. But I am not a rich man and my time on Gry ensured I never would be, so I am forced to use the slowest and oldest vessels, but even those do not have the air of history that this one does. I don’t think I have ever seen fixed walls and permanent rooms before.”
Catherine nodded. “I’ve sometimes thought about renovating the guts out of the old darling and installing a holo-kit, so we could lay things out the way we want and change it up when we get bored. But every time I think about it, I come back to the same conclusion. I like it this way. So does Bedivere. So it stays and for the fussy passengers, we explain that we have renovated. It’s called antiquarian style.”
Brant smiled.
“You can remove your arm now,” she told him, as the dispenser beeped.
He pulled it out and rubbed the flesh below his elbow, looking around. “In fact, this ship is very old, isn’t it? Much older than anyone suspects.” He spoke off-handedly, but even so, Catherine felt something jump inside her.
“What makes you say that?”
“You’ve renovated, but not the inside, except for recoating surfaces. It’s the outside that has had all the cosmetic work. I was reading the ship’s blueprints. There is a real hull underneat
h the hull that shows to the rest of the world.”
Catherine made herself shrug casually. “Everyone needs a new look every now and then. Especially in the fringes.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never ventured there.” Then he smiled. “Although I suspect that I will end up there. They say no one has a past there. Is that true?”
Catherine relaxed. This was harmless stuff. “Lie down, please, so the scanner can get a full reading.”
He stretched out on the medical bed and Catherine started the diagnostic program. “There’s a lot of romantic nonsense Federation citizens believe about the fringes. Having no past is a good example, although it’s true in a way. People in the fringes aren’t throwbacks, or in-bred. They’re all just normal people and depending on how settled and advanced their world is, they’re busy surviving just like everyone else, so mostly, who you were once doesn’t mean a damn thing. What you can do to help the settlement or the city thrive…that’s how you’re measured.”
“Usefulness. That could be a deceptive gauge.”
“Oh, there’s plenty of con artists, crooks and thieves out there. If you’re dumb enough to get suckered in by one, everyone else figures that’s your look-out.”
“That isn’t a good recipe for trust.”
Catherine smiled. “No, trust doesn’t come easy out there. But once you have someone’s trust, you value it and you do your best not to destroy it.”
The bed pinged.
“You’re clear,” Catherine announced, “and free to go.”
Brant sat up and bent his arm experimentally and prodded at the location of the injection.
“You shouldn’t be able to feel anything,” Catherine said.
“I don’t,” he confirmed. “That’s why I was prodding. There are some nasty virals on Gry and the immunization process was much more invasive.”
“On Earth, in antiquity, they use to slice the flesh open, insert a pellet of the inoculation material, then sew the patient back up and wrap a bandage around the wound. You might die of infection to the wound, or the disease the pellet was supposed to protect you against.”
“Barbaric.”
“It helped humans survive. Shouldn’t you be spiritually uplifted by that?”
Brant slid off the table. “I never said I was perfect.” He paused at the door. “We’re a week out from Soward. No one has said anything about how we are to slide Kemp down to the surface undetected. All traffic has to go through Soward’s Forward Station to get dirtside.”
“Is there a question in there somewhere?” she asked.
“It’s the lack of questions I’m questioning. You’re planning to take the whole ship down to the surface, aren’t you?”
“Jump ships can’t land,” she said automatically.
“Except for this very old one,” Brant said, patting the doorframe and looking up and around. “I do wonder what else the ship is capable of, that might have been very carefully hidden behind facades like the false hull.” He gave her a smile. “See you at the dinner table.”
Chapter Nine
Brant had never stepped inside the engine workrooms before, although Catherine had opened one of the doors and let him peek inside when she had been showing him the ship, his first day aboard. Ball-bound freshie he might be, but he knew enough to stay out of the engineering areas and let Lilita do her work.
So he moved through the crowded room carefully. There were too many consoles and readouts. If he brushed against one and reset something accidentally, there was a good chance he wouldn’t know what he had touched and he certainly wouldn’t know what to correct.
The hum of electronics and the deep background throb of the massive engines behind the shield wall made him uncomfortable. Anywhere that was not Gry still made him uneasy. Gry did not have computers, except for the minimum necessary for communications off-world and for interstellar transports to find them, but the cadre had no need to use them. He had gone thirty years without touching a screen and now they were all around him everywhere he went.
Shipboard life was even more reliant upon electronic processing. Even drawing water from a faucet involved computers, to monitor the purity, to adjust the temperature to something drinkable and to draw the water through plumbing that was subject to gravitational surges and sometimes no gravity at all.
After five years away from Gry, he had become inured to daily life driven by digital enhancements, but he was still adjusting to the level of computer assistance onboard.
That was another reason he had stayed away from the engineering areas. Computers and AIs had no heart to speak of, but their guts and entrails lived in engineering.
He sidled past the banks of servers and tried to pretend the structures were simply mounds of mechanical equipment and kept looking. He could hear something beneath the engines and the electronic humming, just ahead.
He glanced to his right as he moved beyond the edge of a bank of servers and spotted Lilita. She was sitting on the floor, her legs sprawled any way, her abundant curls spilling over her shoulder and covering most of her face, as she looked down at her lap. She had this side of the servers open and was working on a fragile-looking sheet of crystals with a finely made tool. There was a box filled with more tools next to her hip.
She looked up, her dark eyes narrowed. Then she smiled. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll catch something, down here?”
“I admit my comfort level is not what I’d prefer. But you are not easy to find in the common areas.”
She looked up and around at the equipment surrounding her on three sides. “This stuff takes a lot of maintenance. It’s so old, something falls apart every time Catherine kicks in the Machs.” She hefted the board in her hands. “Like these. They were fine three days ago, but now two of the crystals are cracked right through their centers.” She curled her feet under her hips and lifted up onto her knees, to slide the board back into the proper slot. “I spend a lot of time down here because if I didn’t, the ship would start flaking apart.”
“You can fix it even though it’s so old? You know this stuff?”
“It’s old, but the principles are still the same. Well, sort of the same. It’s just a lot bigger than I’m used to. But I can print any parts I need and there’s a stock of crystals so big it could generate its own gravity well, so nothing is ever going to be unfixable.”
“Sort-of the same?”
Lilita frowned, marring the perfection of her flesh. “To look at things at first glance, I could see this stuff is old. But then, when I started digging in, getting to know the structure and the circuitry and how it was all laid out….” She pressed her lips together, looking inward, possibly recalling her exploration of the systems. “It’s far more complex than anything I’ve ever seen.”
“But the AIs are all shackled, right? “
She almost rolled her eyes. “Of course they are. They’ll all itty baby things, only enough smarts to fix themselves and call for help if they can’t. No, it’s the other systems. The support and sub-routines. It’s like someone has been adding capacity and storage any which way, a bit here and a bit there…” She grinned. “I’ll figure it out,” she said. “It’s probably just that the ship is so damn old it’s got redundant circuits and routines all over the place.”
“Most likely,” Brant said politely, although the idea of systems being so old and so out of control there were areas even a good engineer couldn’t map…that didn’t make him any more comfortable. “But that’s probably why they hired an engineer before they hired the muscle.”
She gave him a small smile. “I’m still trying to figure why you’re onboard. Cat could take you down and three others like you before you blink. Come to that, I could probably do the deed myself, long time before you got around to reacting with that old body of yours.”
Brant didn’t take offense. He’d found that most people couldn’t help but comment one way or another on his signs of aging. “On occasion, a second pair of hands is helpful. Catherine bel
ieves some of those occasions might be coming up. I’m just glad to have the job.”
Lilita brushed off her hands and put her tools away. “So you found me,” she prompted.
“We’re going to be in the Soward system in a few days. Catherine implied…well, she didn’t even do that much. She failed to point out how we would be able to slide Kemp past the gatekeepers on Soward’s terminal.”
“Probably means we’re not,” Lilita said and got to her feet.
Brant nodded. “Does that mean they’re actually going to land this ship on the surface?”
Lilita grinned at him. “You’re a real sod dog aren’t you? Why can’t we land on the surface?”
“Ships just don’t.”
“Federation ships don’t, but they’re all monstrous great vessels, built in space and not meant to withstand atmospheric maneuvers. Some of the really big ones are more than a kilometer long, so one end would be in zero gravity while the other is pulled down toward the surface as soon as it hits the gravity well. It would snap like a circuit board.”
“So this ship can land?”
She leaned against the server and cross her arms. “It was probably built in gravity. Once upon a time, all ships landed. All the colonial ships are designed to land because new worlds don’t have their own station yet. The ones that can’t land dock with a ship kept in orbit until the world gets its act together and builds a proper dock.”
She spoke with a tone of authority that said she knew what she was talking about.
“You’ve pioneered?” he asked, confused. Bedivere had said that Lilita was very young.
“I’m thinking about it, so I spent a year or so researching.”
He drew in a slow breath, absorbing once more the long-life viewpoint of most people. “To spend a whole year just finding out….”
Her expression sobered. “I guess a year is a long chunk out of your time, isn’t it?”
Faring Soul - Science Fiction Romance Page 6