by Wil McCarthy
“You should come with us,” Conrad said, in a last-ditch effort to save Mack from himself.
But Mack just snorted. “Will you stop already? Locked in that ship I'd go crazy in a week. Besides, I've eaten at the king's table, and partaken of his daughter. There are limits to how far my treacheries extend, you know? That's no reflection on you, sir—I admire what you're doing here—but this place is my home. I'll stay. I'll cope.”
“Jesus,” Conrad said, with a hand on his brow. “You be careful, Mack. Do you hear me? You live a good life.”
“Always have,” the troll said simply. “And when death comes for me, as it surely will someday, why, then I'll be back with my princess again. What could be finer? Quite frankly it's you I'm worried about.” He paused a moment and added, “I'll miss you, Boss. I hope you make it.”
People say a troll cannot weep. People say a lot of things.
Conrad rode up with the fifth and final pod, in an acceleration couch Mack's team had installed in the big, empty chamber that had been the Cryoleum's reception hall. Conrad wished he could fill this space with frozen corpses as well, but that would have been impossible without drawing unwanted attention. So the chamber, which had been designed to hold as many as two hundred live, grieving people, instead held only one.
If the walls had been of wellstone, then he might have seen the spectacular view as induction motors yanked him up the side of the tower for two and a half hours, shrinking the ground beneath him until its curvature was apparent and the atmosphere was just a thin yellow haze clinging to the ground far below. But instead the walls were made of titanium—one of the commonest metals in the silicate crust of P2—and through a crude material like that, Conrad could see nothing.
Thus, weightlessness was a bit of a shock when it came, and even a seasoned space veteran like Conrad was not above releasing some globs of vomit to float in the air around him like smelly, brightly colored ornaments. If he weren't maintaining radio silence, Conrad might have called Xmary to see where she was, to find out when exactly she would be retrieving him. But instead he sat in the glare of artificial lights, afraid to leave his seat for fear of being slammed without warning into the walls or floor when Newhope's grapples finally took hold and reeled him in.
He sat like that for a long time, contemplating the fact that he should have brought a jacket. In the old days, such considerations had been unnecessary, since the shipping containers would be insanely well insulated and his own wellcloth clothing would have kept his skin temperature constant anyway. But Conrad had only two wellcloth outfits left—one a formal suit and the other a Polar Rangers uniform—and he stupidly hadn't thought to wear either one today, possibly because neither one would have felt appropriate for the occasion. So, as the metal cargo pod bled its heat away into the cold vacuum, he huddled and shivered and cursed himself, wondering what else he might have overlooked. Sadly, years of planning were not always enough to prevent these stupid oversights.
Did the cold, in some way, make him hallucinate? Did it trick his eye, his optic nerve, his brain? For he saw a flickering at the corner of his eye, and turned to find himself staring straight into the face of a ghost.
He knew it was a ghost, for it was pale and translucent, all but colorless, and hung in the air just above the floor in exactly the way that ghosts are supposed to. But there were problems with this theory as well. First of all, Conrad had always understood ghosts to be an electromagnetic phenomenon, a sort of quantum imprint in the area where an event—usually traumatic—had taken place. Detecting them took sensors of incredible power and subtlety.
And yet, what good was a word like “ghost” if it couldn't be applied to a thing which fit it so precisely? Had there ever been an era, a time or place or society, where people didn't claim, at least occasionally, to have seen them? With their own eyes, in a moment of shock and horror, when contact with the dead had in fact been the farthest thing from their minds?
The second problem with the theory was that ghosts were, science insisted, merely a recording, not unlike the patterns of a chemical photograph or the acoustically etched grooves in a medieval phonograph record. They could be reconstructed, played back . . . but not interacted with. And yet this ghost of Conrad's appeared to be looking right at him, its tear-streaked face pulling down into a mask of horror at the sight of him. And the mask was one he recognized: Raylene Pine, who had died years before in the Polar Well.
What can be said about it? No man is a stone. Conrad let out a shriek, and the ghost beside him vanished before he could so much as tap the releases on his couch restraints and flail away in terror. Even so, he drew back, gasping and shaking. Then, with a trembling hand, he probed the air where the thing had been, and felt nothing. No ripples or vapor or cold spots. A shiver ran through him.
Had the walls been of wellstone, he might have dismissed the apparition as an accidental hologram, an anomalous burping of stored data released by the flash of a cosmic ray. But he had built this room himself, or overseen it anyway, and he'd conducted a thorough inspection just a few hours ago. So he knew—he knew—there was nothing in here that could produce an effect like that.
“Ah, mystery,” Rodenbeck had written once. “That things should feast themselves before us which have no rightful cause! If living long means seeing much, then I fear we shan't escape it, this whimsy of the gods that writes its scorn upon us.”
Fuff. There were too many goddamn Rodenbeck quotes kicking around. You could frame your whole life in them, knowing an infinite supply of new ones waited just around the corner. But they didn't keep you warm.
When the docking came, it was much gentler than Conrad had feared. Newhope had nice, old-fashioned gravitic grapples, like smaller versions of the graser beams at the heart of the Gravittoir, and the movements they imparted did not feel like acceleration. More like falling, which he was already doing anyway since he was in zero gravity—that state of never-ending fall. Rotation, of course, could not be masked in this way, and he did feel the pod wheeling around at one point, and then the bump and clatter of physical docking clamps taking hold. And then, because the pod was wider than Newhope's ertial shields, there came a series of handclap noises as the explosive pins in the pod wall blew, and the left and right thirds of the pod, under considerable spring tension, folded in under it. Now it was shaped less like a building, less like a tuberail car, and more like a manta ray with its arms wrapped around a wellstone piling, where the piling was the cargo spindle of Newhope, within which lay the central staircase and the narrow air, water, and power conduits.
Finally, Conrad's ears popped as the air systems mated. The pressure inside the pod—starting out at sea level, which for Planet Two meant just over three bars, had bled down to less than half that much over the course of the launch, and as it equalized with the much thinner, cleaner air of Newhope, it halved again to just seven hundred millibars. Technically speaking, a person could get the bends from such a dramatic pressure change, but that was rare, and time was short.
Fortunately, Newhope's internal gravity was turned off; otherwise Conrad's floor would have become a wall, and he would be dangling from his straps. But it was in the actual floor, directly in front of the bishop's podium, that a metal hatchway opened, connecting him at last to the interior of Newhope. He unmoored from his seat, launched himself at the hatchway, and caught himself on a cold metal handgrip mounted on the open hatch's inside.
Once free of the chamber, he found the matter of the ghost a bit easier to dismiss. It was just too quiet in there, too cold and still, where stepping into Newhope was like coming home. With practiced ease, he pulled himself into the stairway, placed his feet against the handrail, and launched himself up toward the bridge.
Ah. Once your balance adjusted, there really was nothing like zero gravity. As he glided up the stair shaft, correcting his course with occasional pushes from feet and hands, the levels slid past him one by one. He could fly, yes, in this space where gravity normally reigned!
It was a feeling he never got tired of.
At the top of the shaft, on the bridge, he found Xmary in her captain's chair, and Useless sitting over at Information. Useless' actual name was Eustace; she was the painfully young wife of the ship's only other crewmate: the Facilitator, the superlative spaceman, the one and only Yinebeb Fecre, who was presently down in Engineering. There were people who were competent to run a starship, and there were people whom Conrad could trust; and of the dozen or so who were both, there were only these two, Xmary and Feck, who were so firmly attached to Newhope—and so loosely to the colony itself—that they would make this sacrifice. That he would even consider asking it. Poor Eustace was just along for the ride.
“Welcome aboard,” Xmary told him, motioning him toward his old seat. “You look . . . shaken.”
“It was an interesting ride,” Conrad told her. “The Cryoleum is haunted.”
She nodded without really processing that. “We'll be changing orbits in about fifteen minutes, to rendezvous with a high-orbit refueling station. There, we'll top off our tanks, and leave from a higher potential in the gravity well.”
“Sounds good,” Conrad said. Generally speaking, details like that were left up to the captain's discretion, a fact which did not change merely because Conrad had hatched this particular conspiracy.
“How do I find the station again?” Useless asked.
“Never mind, dear,” Xmary told her sweetly. “The nav solution has already been entered.”
She pressed a lighted circle on her armrest and brought up a view of Engineering in a holie screen on the wall. “Feck, are you about ready for main drive propulsion?”
Life-sized, like a man looking in from an adjacent room, Feck looked up and nodded. “The reactors are online, obviously, drawing about one hundred kilowatts for internal power and maneuvering thrusters. The deutrelium pumps are already primed. All I have to do is open the valves. What I'm saying is, I don't need a warm-up period. I can light the fuse anytime you say.”
“Ah! You've streamlined the boost ignition sequence, then. Very good.”
“Thank you, ma'am,” he said, in easy tones which belied the words' formality.
“Good for you, baby,” Eustace added. Then, fiddling with the controls on her own panel, she managed to cast half the bridge into darkness.
Useless, indeed.
Conrad supposed he should take a more charitable view. After all, he had been young and green once, too. It had taken him quite a while to learn how to do things onboard a ship, and still longer to do them confidently and with style. And it was hard to begrudge Feck his young bride. He'd been a spaceman for quite a long time, and that was not a profession for lovers, or at least for would-be family men. But sooner or later, everyone seemed to get the urge to settle down for a while, and Feck, knowing he would be leaving for a very long, very isolated journey, had grabbed the first handy female who might agree to come with him. Which was not a stupid way for him to approach the problem.
Unfortunately, Eustace had no way of knowing what lay ahead: the stresses and deprivations of space travel, the confined quarters, and most of all the boggling ennui of living onboard this ship, with nowhere else to go, for eighteen decades. Conrad himself could barely get his arms around that one, could barely imagine how they would cope at all, much less thrive.
There was no quantum storage for them to crawl into this time, no medical-grade fax machines or memory cores. If they froze themselves—which was certainly an option if things got bad enough—they could not be thawed out and returned to life without Queendom technology. Medically speaking, it was a treatment of last resort.
So it was tempting—almost inevitable, really—to brand Eustace's enthusiasm as foolish in the extreme. But Conrad could remember very well the days of his own youth, when he would've leaped at such an adventure without hesitation. A whole new star system, a whole new society, and the promise of immortality at journey's end! Really, Conrad should be ashamed of himself for thinking unkind thoughts about her at all.
But still, even so, Newhope had been the first of the great Queendom starships, and even after 250 years she was still the pride of the Barnardean fleet. She had never—truly never—had a crew person this green, even at the very start when she'd been designed to keep as many hands busy as possible. Eustace's training for the mission had, Conrad imagined, consisted of nothing more than a few weeks in bed with Feck. And that was a poor preparation indeed for what lay ahead.
“I suppose we could go right now, then,” Xmary mused.
“Absolutely, ma'am,” Feck replied.
Xmary looked at Conrad. “Any objection?”
Conrad was about to deny it, and give his blessing for the journey to begin, when a second holographic window opened beside Feck's, and within it was the image of King Bascal, as real as life itself. He was wearing his diamond crown, whose weight pulled down the skin around it, giving his face a saggy appearance, an air of gravity. But this was his only concession to majesty; he was otherwise dressed in loose gray pajamas, with no adornment of any sort.
“Ah, Conrad, I thought I might find you here,” he said. This was technically a breach of protocol, since he should first address the Information officer and request an audience with the first mate. But Bascal's adherence to Queendom-style protocol was spotty at best, and today he seemed particularly irate.
“Hi, Bas,” Conrad said to him.
“What're you doing?” the king asked. It was an honest question. He knew something was going on, and he didn't like it; but at the same time he was curious, and part of him was maybe even a little bit amused.
“Just running a little errand,” Conrad answered.
Bascal nodded absently at that. “Uh-huh. Except that the crew of Newhope was off-loaded at Bubble Hood about four hours ago. As near as I can figure, you've got three people onboard that ship.”
“Four, actually,” Conrad corrected.
Bascal scowled, his voice growing firmer. “I'll ask you again: What are you doing?”
If Conrad had had any say in the matter, he would have cut the channel right there and then. But Newhope was a giant block of nanobe-tended wellstone, intelligent all the way down to the molecular level, and Bascal's Royal Overrides could command the obedience of all but the most critical systems. Those, fortunately, were safety locked and required biometric authentication, which could not be performed at a distance.
“I think maybe we should skip the refueling,” Conrad said to Xmary. “Let's just light up and go. Just go, now. That refueling is only for safety margin anyway, right?”
“Yes, I concur,” Xmary said. Then, glancing at the other window, “Feck?”
Feck nodded firmly. “Firing the engines now, ma'am.”
“You people are in a lot of trouble,” Bascal said, in a manner that was almost friendly. “You do know that, right? That starship is a very valuable—in fact irreplaceable—piece of property. My property. Using it without authorization is a serious crime,” his eyes settled on Xmary, “even for a captain.”
Then, anything else he might've said was drowned out by the rising groan of Newhope's engines. Fully loaded like this, kicking directly to full thrust, the start-up transients were at once louder and gentler—more damped by mass—than usual. And thanks to the ertial shields, the effective mass of Newhope was very small, so that the acceleration, which was barely perceptible from the inside, was in fact quite impressive. On holie windows all around the bridge, Planet Two could be seen shrinking beneath them.
“Planetary escape velocity . . . now,” Feck was saying. He had moved most of the helm functions down to Engineering, so he could steer and navigate while keeping the engines stoked. “We have broken orbit and are falling sunward. Eccentricity of our Barnard orbit is 0.2 and climbing.”
“Good,” Xmary said. “When it gets to 0.987, cut the engines and resume coasting.”
“Aye, ma'am.”
Eccentricity was a measure of their orbit's height and narrowness�
�its resemblance to a parabola rather than a circle. Numbers just under 1.0 meant the orbit was a flat ellipse, long and thin and very fast, like the trail of a short-period comet. As in their long-ago departure from Sol, the orbit would graze the chromosphere of Barnard—its hot middle atmosphere—and then the sails would unfurl and the engines would light up again, and the eccentricity would blow right past 1.0, breaking the top of the ellipse, opening it into a parabola whose arms stretched out to infinity. And then as their speed continued to build, a hyperbola, which reached infinity a hell of a lot faster, and also happened to be pointed back at Sol.
“Jesus,” Bascal said, the color draining from his face. “That's a sun-grazer. Unless you're committing suicide, which would be damned peculiar under the circumstances, there's only one reason for an orbit that tight: to fire at the bottom and boost your apogee. You bastards, you're going interstellar. Back to Sol? To Mommy and Daddy? Why are you doing that? Just four of you, sneaking away like dogs. In my ship.”
“Not sneaking,” Conrad said, unable to help himself.
“Not sneaking,” Bascal repeated. “Hmm. What are you up to, then? You and Xmary and some freshly printed ta'ahine I've never seen before.”
“Eustace Faxborn, Sire.”
“Be quiet, dear,” said Xmary.
“And who else?” the king asked. “Feck the Programmable Spaceman? My people tell me you're carrying five cargo pods which went up the tower just this morning. That's quite a load. What's in the pods?”