Then she noticed that the rim of the top bunk had rungs on it, like a ladder. She hadn’t noticed that before, and if she had, wouldn’t have guessed why. Now it was obvious. Sitting trapped in here, without even a bed to rest on, seemed like a horrid way to spend two hours and seventeen minutes. Besides, this wasn’t quite as disorientating as she’d feared… and fear itself, she was becoming quite sick and tired of. Fear was debilitating, and she hated it — the thudding heart, the endless, breathless tension. She recalled what Major Thakur had said, that those who feared most often failed on the climb, or died. Fear was sometimes useful, but when the thing you feared was present in everything around you, and prevented you from dealing with your situation practically, it became a pointless distraction.
And what had the Major said? Gain self-knowledge? Start today? If she asked Erik for permission to wander, he’d say no, and she’d be stuck here. And she hated to bother the Major again with her weakling, civilian requests. She was a grown woman, she could go for a walk if she wished. And so she put her hands on the bunk ladder, and climbed.
Atop the bunk, she could reach the door quite easily. The door did not open immediately, and a beeping alarm sounded in the corridor outside. Then it opened, very slowly. When it stopped, Lisbeth grabbed the rim and walked her feet up to the end of the bunk. That got her shoulders out the door, and…
“Ware!” came a call as some legs passed her, and jumped the door she’d opened. That had been why the alarm in the corridor — the doors now became trapdoors into which people could fall. She heaved herself up quite easily, and scrambled over the edge.
The corridor looked different, floor on one side, ceiling on the other. She followed the spacer who’d passed, and saw her jumping the doors at her feet whether they were open or not. That seemed like a good idea, and Lisbeth copied. Most insystem freighters did not have this problem, of course, as they were designed so that ‘aft’ thrust was the floor, in a vertical stack. Without jump engines, they’d accelerate at 1-G toward their destination, then turn over at halfway and decelerate at 1-G all the way in. Jump engines made it possible to gain or lose enormous velocity instantly, and so most insystem travel for FTL ships was coasting without thrust, with gravity from cylinder rotation only.
The fear returned when she reached the first trunk corridor. It ran a good portion of the crew cylinder from fore to aft, and now as she approached the corner, the once-innocuous passage yawned at her feet with a sheer, endless drop. Traction lines she’d not seen before had appeared, and now ran up and down the shaft, one line heading up, the other down. Spacers rode it up and down, standing on the little footrests, clipped to the rope with their harness. The woman Lisbeth had been following took a little wand from a pocket and extended it to the length of her arm. Then she took her harness clip, unhitched it and mounted it on the extended wand. A fast clip to the upward rope, then it caught on the next empty handhold. The woman stepped off as her harness pulled tight, and swung to the rope, put her feet in, and rode it up.
That simple huh? Lisbeth watched in amazement as someone else got off at her level, and using the wand to clip the harness to another rope line that extended into the corridor from above — that must have also popped out automatically when the thrust kicked in, Lisbeth thought. She hadn’t noticed it before. They didn’t even stop the rope, just hooked, jumped and swung into the corridor mouth like some tree swinging primate.
Lisbeth didn’t particularly want to do that, she was sure she’d miss her level or lose her nerve… or worse, jump without attaching properly, and fall. But she recalled more documentary footage of people getting off when these ropelines touched the bottom. Surely she could manage that?
She searched several pockets and found the wand-thing. Extended it, and found how it attached to the harness hook — she was an engineering graduate after all, she told herself firmly. And she knew how to rock climb and use safety harnesses, there were plenty of engineering tasks that required it. Then she waited until a clear foothold appeared on the down-rope, reached with her clip with hands that only shook a little… waited until the footrests passed and clipped just above them. The clip snapped immediately shut, and her triumph lasted a split second until the descending handholds caught the clip, and she realised her harness was about to yank her over the edge.
She managed not to scream, and jumped. And fell, yanked tight on the harness and swung into the rope, spinning around in dangling confusion, the rope hitting her face and burning her hand as she flailed at it. And grabbed, heart hammering, and scrambled to find the footrest with her feet… and got on. She hung there, gazing about as the corridor walls rose past her…
“Ware!” called a voice from below, and the next person rising past her fended off as her feet nearly kicked him in the head.
“Sorry! I’m sorry!” But he was past and going up, and someone waiting on the next corridor down to get on was looking at her oddly. She’d done it, she realised with elation. Only now the corridor was doglegged forty-five degrees sideways, and the ropeline simply dragged at the corners — she saw someone coming up below having to walk up the wall to get around without banging the corner. Here on the outer side of the dogleg was a big elastic net sticking halfway out into the corridor. To catch falling spacers, she realised.
She pushed around the outer edge, thankful the rope handholds were offset so that descending and ascending spacers wouldn’t hit that corner at the same time, squeezed past another rising, then hit the next dogleg corner with her butt as the corridor straightened out again. That corner was cushioned, and opposing it on the far wall was another big elastic net. So any falling spacer who missed the first net would hit this corner, obviously, and bounce across to land in that net. Theoretically. She wondered how many who did so didn’t survive it. In a 10-G push, a five meter fall was like fifty meters at 1-G. Even a two meter fall would probably crush you like an egg. What was left after a tumble down this corridor at 10-G, she didn’t want to think about.
Beyond, the corridor end was approaching. Now this looked simple enough, and she unclipped her harness and simply stepped off as the rope passed its end pulley and went around. There. And looked up the vast height above with a real sense of accomplishment. Now, she thought. Engineering.
Engineering HQ was built with its back to the rear cylinder bulkhead. The main entrance door was now a hole in the floor with a rope ladder on one side, and a rope on the other. “Ware!” someone called as she peered in, and she stepped quickly aside for a spacer in a hurry who sat on the doorframe, grabbed the rope, then slid down at speed. The rope ladder was to come up, Lisbeth guessed. Well, she’d done this before in PT classes. She sat, legs over the edge, took the rope and told herself that this was nothing compared to what she’d just done. Then slid off, and let gravity take her down with the rope on her jacket arm to save her the rope burn.
And looked around as her feet hit the bottom. She was to one side of a bridge not unlike the main bridge, with various scan posts before wide screen arrays. People still sat in those chairs, flat on their backs, and talked back and forth or on coms. Here on the ‘floor’, people who wanted to talk to them stopped and looked up. Getting in and out of those chairs would take a boost, Lisbeth thought. She peered up at one, and saw display screens showing engine schematics, jump line routes, and vid feeds from various drones probing the damage. Those drones would now be burning at 1-G just to keep up.
The woman in the chair looked back at her, her head just a little above Lisbeth’s own. “Hey. Lisbeth Debogande, right?”
Lisbeth nodded. “I’ve got a masters in engineering from Getti College, graduated top of my class. Specialised on a starship track, I was wondering if…”
“Hey Rooke?” the woman said into coms. “You wanted another eye on those jumpline schematics? I’ve got you one.” She pointed, for Lisbeth’s benefit. “That way.”
Ducking under chairs and posts, Lisbeth found a young-looking black man sitting crosslegged before a portable dis
play mount, with two others crouched alongside pointing and talking tersely. One glanced up as Lisbeth approached.
“Um, hi… I’m Lisbeth Debogande, I’ve got a masters in engineering from…”
“We know,” said the man who’d looked, and handed her a slate. “This is set for jumpline schematics, the comp will feed you your area, you need to walk through the auxiliary powerloadings, they’re haywire at the moment and we don’t trust auto diagnostic when that happens. Watch for spikes, report anomalies. Got it?”
Lisbeth nodded rapidly, took the slate and looked for somewhere to sit. “Just… anywhere?”
“Anywhere at all,” the man said drily, and returned his attention to the young black man’s screens, and their ongoing conversation. That man’s nametag read Rooke, and his shoulder stripes were a Second Lieutenant’s. He didn’t even glance at her. Lisbeth found a seat against what used to be the floor, and got to work.
* * *
Erik lay back on the command chair, a boot stuck against a display support to keep the circulation going. Ahead and closing, Scan zoomed on the rock they were chasing. They had visual now — a dark blob against the bright starfield. They were approaching from darkside, so only a faint crescent was visible from Argitori’s three distant suns. It did not tumble, as Geish had said. It was roughly ovoid, and a touch over a kilometre long, plenty big enough to hide Phoenix from half the sky.
“Well this is interesting,” said Geish, cycling through several of his most advanced displays. “Several of the surface features look regular. Same shape and size. Scancomp says an eighty-three percent chance it’s been hollowed.”
Erik frowned. “We’re a long way off the elliptic plane for a settlement.”
“An insystem settlement, sure,” cautioned Kaspowitz.
“But what are the odds?” Geish replied. “An FTL settlement here? Whose? And out of all the rocks in the system, we just happen to find this?”
Erik recalled something the Captain had told him once, in conversation over a drink during second-shift. “Second Lieutenant, did you find that rock off auto-search?”
“Standard auto-search,” Geish confirmed.
“But scancomp memory plays a role in that,” Erik pressed. “I mean there’s millions of rocks out here, maybe thousands with suitable trajectories.”
Geish frowned at him, rolling his head on the headrest to look. “You’re saying scancomp found this rock for us?”
“Something the Captain told me.” Erik chewed on a nail. “Ghosts in the system, if a ship’s been around long enough. It finds things, long locked into memory, no telling how it got there.”
“Yeah but we wipe excess data from comp every few years,” Jiri added from Scan Two.
“Not on this warship we don’t,” said Kaspowitz. “LC’s right. I’ve seen it. Navcomp finds weird little things like that all the time. Statistical anomalies. Phoenix may have latest tech, but her memory’s old as the Ancients.”
And the tech didn’t come from us. No one said it, it was in the back of everyone’s mind. All of Fleet’s fundamental technologies had been given to them by the chah’nas. It wasn’t the first time they’d done that — the first time had been to save humanity’s ass against the krim. But the Triumvirate War had been more of a booster, a high-tech kick in the pants to keep the humans moving along at a suitable rate. And this time, the chah’nas were not humanity’s only friend, as the alo had joined in as well — not so much in fighting, but certainly in weapons and industry. In the latter part of the war, they’d even begun granting humanity limited use of their coveted warship technology. Only a few had been built, hybrids of existing human and new alo technology, but those few had performed spectacularly. Perhaps the most prominent of those, was Phoenix.
“Looks dead,” Geish added of the rock. “If it was active I’d be getting some heat signature, some echo off a reflective panel, some external structure. This one, nothing.”
“LC,” said Second Lieutenant Shilu from Coms, “I’m getting transponder traffic on that new arrival, 179-by-7 off trajectory.”
“Yep,” said Jiri after a moment. “Yep, I got that, that’s chah'nas. Warship Tek-to-thi.”
“She was on Fajar Station with us,” Erik recalled. “Kulik Class vessel, not our size but fast. Someone sent her after us.”
“To watch, or to participate?” Shahaim wondered. “Sure is real noisy of her to show up in human business and broadcast like that.”
“Chah'nas are a noisy people,” Kaspowitz said drily.
Erik recalled the chah'nas ambassador at his mother’s party. Recalled it nodding to him, and raising a glass in one of its four hands. Uncle Thani warning that this whole thing had the smell of aliens about it. Alien allies. This ship was making noise. It made him wonder what else was hiding out there, running faster than them to get ahead of their current position with no announcement at all.
“Scan,” he said. “Keep your eyes peeled. That ship might be trying to get our attention. Let’s make sure she doesn’t have all of it.”
“Aye LC,” said Geish in a tone of agreement.
“Could push harder to make that rock?” Shahaim suggested.
“Any more than one-G and our tail lights up like Festival. This is as hard as we dare push without drawing attention. There’s just too damn many of them out there.”
He just hoped they made that damn rock before someone sprang them. With the jump lines shot, their next jump would be more likely fatal than any incoming ordinance.
* * *
No sooner had thrust been cut and G returned to normal than word came from the bridge for a boarding party to suit up. Forty minutes after that, and in the midst of armoured preparations in Assembly, Trace got a call from Erik himself asking to meet her at her quarters.
She jogged back and met him at the door just as he arrived, it being about equal time from Bridge and Assembly. She opened and gestured him in, and saw the bednets holding loose sheets bundled against the G-wall.
Erik turned on her with concern. “Where’s Lisbeth?”
“She’s been down in Engineering the last few hours. Helping Rooke with analysis.”
Erik stared. “She went down during the push?” Trace waited calmly for him to realise she’d already answered that question. “And you let her?”
“I was busy. You were busy. She used her judgement. I talked to Warrant Officer Chau, she said Lisbeth’s been sitting quietly, making herself useful.”
Erik put his hands on his head and stared at a wall. “She went down the corridor?” Again Trace waited for him to realise that there was no other way to reach Engineering from here. And she’d already answered that question. “Good god Major…”
“Your sister is a very bright girl. She’s going to be stuck with us for some time. I assure you, she will not like being stuck in a small room for all that time. She’ll need to find her own way, and you’re going to have to let her.”
“Fucking Kulina. You know, not everyone’s as tough as you…”
“Everyone is as tough as me,” Trace said with certainty. “It’s just that not everyone knows it. Now, you had something to show me?”
In frustration Erik pulled a chip reader from his pocket. “I got this back from maintenance just now from the plumbing filter.”
“Your bowels work fast.”
Erik hit a button, and uplinked a connection to the room display. Captain Pantillo’s face appeared. Or rather, a blurry close up of the lower part of his unshaven jaw. But the voice was certainly his, rough, tired and very low. As though worried someone was listening.
“Okay,” he said. “To whoever finds this. I’m pretty sure it might be you, Erik.” A deep breath. “And I don’t think you’re going to like how you find it.”
Trace stared at the screen. And found herself tilting her head, as though somehow that change in perspective might reveal the rest of the Captain’s face. He was talking into some kind of handheld device. Something simple that hadn’t been confiscat
ed from him, or that he’d rigged with a simple memory chip. A watch? Certainly he was in a cell, lying on the bed. Probably the same cell Erik had found him in.
“I can’t speak long. Just know that this whole thing runs very deep. I can’t tell you what to do, because like what happens when the LC assumes command and I can’t make the chair, you’ll have to make your own decisions based on circumstances as you find them. Don’t ask what I’d do. If you’ve found this, I’m no longer here. Follow your judgement. I’d never have asked for you to be in my crew if I didn’t trust it.”
Trace glanced at Erik, and saw him struggling with emotion. Moisture in those brown eyes, dark brows knitted.
“I won’t apologise for what I’ve dumped you in. On a personal level I am profoundly sorry. But as you’ll find the deeper you dig, this is so much bigger than me, or you, or all of us together. We’re all about the bigger picture. That’s why we fought this war. I trust you can handle that bigger picture as you’ve handled it up till now.
“I can’t tell you much specifically because I can’t be sure who’s going to find this chip. Revealing what I know might reveal my sources, who have to be protected. But know that this story begins where the last story ended, and humanity’s fate is not nearly as much in our hands and arms as we’d thought. The more things change in this galaxy, the more they stay the same.
“Tell my family that I love them. My blood family, and my ship family. Trace, please protect them all. I know you will. And keep an eye out for that man we’ve discussed, you’ll find him interesting, I promise. Gotta go.” The camera view lifted briefly from his jaw to a closeup of his eyes. Familiar, slanted, wrinkled with experience the treatments typically hid. Smiling, she just knew, even though she could not see his whole face. Smiling at her. At them all.
The screen blanked. Trace blinked back tears. She could not trust herself to speak.
“A couple of things,” said Erik, his voice tight. “First, who is ‘that man you’ve discussed?’”
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