In the last place he looks, the man finds a cold speck of life, life that whimpers and shrieks at his touch.
Crewed again, strangers fumbling, then sure at her controls, retracing a familiar taped course, the approach to Thromberg locked in and accepted. All systems nominal.
Docked time, drive systems dormant, a pause like peace. Communication links to the station activated; traffic along the link is steady, unremarkable.
Suddenly, proximity alarms shrill through every plate and joint. Danger! Damage! Thieves! The stationer, Aaron Raner, is back, keying in codes to mute the ship’s response to what is happening at her locks. Burning, voices, power fluctuations, the scream of evacuating air. Agreeable, sensible orders to seal up tight. Then all fail safes are turned off and the Merry Mate II finds herself ripping away from the station. Danger! Damage! Thieves! Her machine cries are silenced again, this time with a lock, this time for good.
A tape grants stability and purpose. She accepts it, switching system drives to translight, aiming for the origin of her living cargo, if not her own. Origin for the ’Mate was the Callisto shipyards, in orbit around Jupiter. Perhaps, if machines had longings, she feels one for the safety of home.
There is no safety here. This isn’t a convoy; she’s one of a crowd, a torrent, a streaming irregular mass of translight drives corrupting the very space she rides until some tumble off course, losing themselves in nothing. Their final signals pass through what’s still real and travel ever away, becoming ghosts for the future.
Meanwhile, voices argue throughout her corridors, unfamiliar voices debating topics of no concern to a ship; Raner’s voice urges caution, reason. The stationer does not touch her controls but holds the codes for their use. When not calming others, he stays with the tiny speck of life, speaking words repetitive in their softness, adapting tools to touch without pain.
A restful time for a machine, given direction and asked only for speed. Does she dream then or hum in chords of power?
Plummet from translight. Sol System.
Raner has muffled her alarms; she can’t shout Danger! Damage! Thieves! But warn offs streak red across all her boards. The strange crew and Raner curse and shout to no avail. They use her sensors to see for themselves.
Vast distances are made conquerable by convention; so the patrol ships knew to wait here for incomers. This is the lane swept clear of hazards for those bound to Earth. Now it is filled with them.
How absurd to simply stop, hanging Solward of Neptune. How much more absurd to stop as one of this company of vagabonds, this fleet come together for no more organized rationale than fear has its time and any movement can seem to safety.
Incoming transmission: Turn back. Sol System is under quarantine to protect humanity from the Quill contagion. No one from the stations will be permitted to enter until this ban is lifted.
Turn back or be destroyed.
The ’Mate’s chronometers keep track of time passing; her crew are frozen in place.
A broadcast from one of their companions: garbled, incoherent pleading. It ends abruptly.
Danger! Damage! Thieves! The ’Mate’s alarms are mute, but her views show for those waiting how the leading ships are being targeted two at a time, five, now ten.
Raner shouts a command; the tape is ejected, reversed, reinserted. The ship hits translight breaking all the rules; space shatters around her as others do the same, space that splinters into light as those who hesitate become small suns instead.
Do ships mourn? Humans do.
Do ships comprehend governments and laws? Humans must. The Patrol who killed the ships enforce the laws set by Earth for all of Sol System. Earth is the heart and mind of humanity, an overburdened heart and overcrowded mind perhaps, but nonetheless the seat of all policy. What Earth fears, everyone fears.
Oh, there are other voices. The great system universities—Titan, Luna, Phobos, and, the oldest, Antarctica—come closest to independence and pride themselves on being opinionated. Their mandate is to look outward, to pave the way for humanity to expand beyond Sol, to seed a future beyond Earth. But the Quill had struck them first and hardest, stealing away the terraforming projects they’d designed, at the same time crippling the huge corporations who’d invested everything in humanity’s next stage of growth. The universities and corporations had learned the lesson of fear well.
Danger! Damage! Thieves! Not quick enough. A blast catches up as translight engages; the ’Mate screams without sound. Autorepairs initiate, cut speed, necessitate deviation, alter the panicked flight.
Other ships are hobbled, some crippled, some die. Their combined flight is a halting one as suited crews work to exhaustion helping passengers, bundled within freight canisters because there are no more suits, make the dangerous transit to healthier ships.
The tiny speck of life in the ’Mate’s cabin sleeps; perhaps ships do as well, given a course and repaired systems.
Plummet from translight. Thromberg Station.
The Merry Mate II is already late; Raner utters a command to stop them before approach is locked. Suspicion or caution; both are improvements over blind risk. Perhaps the ship approves.
Her screens capture the crew. They stare out at the spectacle of the vast cylinder of the station besieged by hundreds of ships, large and small, fully intact to barely holding air.
Raner cries out at something he sees. A ship careens past them, too close, out of control, bleeding her air as flame. Danger! Damage! Thieves! the ’Mate cries silently. Specks tumble from the ship: pieces of debris, suited survivors. The station is forgotten in the urgency of dealing with what can be done.
Codes allow the unlawful—gravity off, both of the ’Mate’s freight locks open to space, her holds scoured to vacuum, her interior protected only by bulkheads and access door locks. A silent cacophony as both mag boots and scrap thump home on her outer surface, a confusion of what should be saved and what her sensors scream to avoid. It continues, spreads into her holds as some move within while others reach her hull.
The proper place of things is restored: relief to systems designed to prevent risk. The holds warm, fill with air as well as moans and molecules of scorched flesh. There is a woman Raner cares for, ignoring urgent demands about courses and futures. She left her hands in the other ship, it seems; not the most sorely wounded, since her voice lifts to be heard with Raner’s, discussing courses and futures after all.
A ship can see all ways at once; inside, outside makes no difference. The ’Mate’s forward views fill with Thromberg’s white curve, emergency patches like fingernail scratches of dull gray metal scoring its perfection, every intact docking port inhospitably closed.
Communication links overload repeatedly, kicking off-line as too many voices demand to be heard. Perhaps the ship is overwhelmed with human passions and cannot bear to listen. One voice gets through, calling for Raner by name. Perhaps the man is overwhelmed and cannot bear to answer.
Do ships grow impatient? Boards flash demands as resources run low—perhaps that is one and the same.
Do humans? Never doubt they consider time an enemy. As the hours accumulate, the voices sputter and fade to ominous, waiting silence. Many on the ’Mate sleep. Raner does not. He divides his time with mechanical precision between the baby, the woman—Rosalind—and the ’Mate’s view of the station.
Sensors, like a sleeping dog’s ears, react first to change. One of the dozens of ships hovering in line with the ’Mate powers up without warning, unforgivably close to others—Danger! Damage! Thieves! the ’Mate would wail if she could. No need for her alarms—Raner stands at the view screen, statue-still, watching the ship as she moves deceptively slowly from the line, acceleration disguised by perspective, heading for Thromberg.
The Haida V sends out her ship-protest as proximity alarms and emergency ident codes, machine cries humans can ignore at will. Thromberg’s horrified echoes fill the monitors with flashes of red. The collision fools the eye but not sensors set to calculate the
tangents of debris. The Haida is pockmarked by shards of the station’s metal as they ricochet off her hull; the ’Mate braces herself to be next.
Haida stays in place, her nose fused within the mass of buckled plates by either luck or desperate planning. Suited figures leap from her air locks, drifting down to the larger mass of the station, some with cabling stringing out behind them that catch the last flare of sunlight over Thromberg’s long belly.
Wrongness. Perversion. Are these concepts to a starship? Perhaps the ’Mate rationalizes the attachments as being like those in a shipyard; where hoses and other lines are temporary, messy things; where humans work together to aid and repair ships. There’s no doubt the Haida needs aid and repair.
There’s no doubt others do as well. As the light from the star Thromberg orbits as home is lost behind her rim, the waiting turns into something else. One by one, then by the dozen, other ships power up and approach the station—ever so slowly, as if fearing to be chased away again, as if lacking the bold courage—or insanity—of the Haida. They hurry to touch down in the shadows, crews scrambling outside in the utter cold to gnaw their way into the station’s promise of warmth and safety.
The docking area rolls back into dawn, waiting ships synchronized to its spin, strange silence from all concerned. Below, the station’s surface looks oddly normal, like the landing field on some airless moon. This is where ships should be, this is where they were welcomed once. The ’Mate listens, but where there should be the reassuring overlap of codes and instructions comes only silence. Saving grace for all—those landing understand they must touch only here, on the docking ring itself, or risk wobbling the seemingly invulnerable station from her orbit.
Nightfall. There are new stars nearby as ships turn on their docking lights to avoid ramming one another as wave after wave descends to join the others on the station. The ’Mate is soon alone.
Do machines face conflicts within their programming? Humans must. Rosalind arrives on the bridge, given room by the rest. She stands by Raner, the stationer, for a moment, both look at the scene in the ’Mate’s screens, then she whispers in his ear. He shakes his head violently, utters incoherent words. Others grab his arms, they are rough, the ’Mate is alarmed by violence near her controls. Danger! Damage! Thieves! but her silenced voice counts for naught.
There is sudden stillness. Raner shakes an arm free, stares at Rosalind, then reaches forward to input the codes for manual control. The ’Mate drifts down and away from herself, an inner distancing that perhaps brings a certain resigned peace. Raner pulls his other arm from a now-loose grip and leaves the bridge to care for the tiny speck of life.
Does the ’Mate know this is her final journey? Perhaps there is comfort in that as well.
Pardell knew there was no point rushing Rosalind. She’d seen the worst his peculiar nature could do, had sat with him while Raner tried drug after drug to control the convulsions. She’d made sure someone would stay with him after Raner’s death, although making it clear she couldn’t bear to remain. Since then, her habit was to drop in, like this, unannounced but usually for reasons that showed she kept track of him. It had been comforting, until today.
Today, Pardell thought suddenly, he’d had too much of being watched, even by those who cared about him.
Rosalind’s right hand was thick and paddlelike, incapable of fine movement. Her left hand was more elaborate. Under its three-fingered glove was a small yet powerful servo mechanism her crewmates had liberated from an internal repair ’bot with no further need for it. At the moment, Rosalind was using it to turn her cup in delicate circles on the tabletop, alternately gripping, twisting, and releasing. She could as easily squeeze its metal flat, but Rosalind loathed waste. She seemed to find her own movements fascinating, and didn’t look up at him when she asked suddenly: “Why do you risk it, young Aaron?”
He knew what she meant and considered pretending he didn’t, then shrugged. “Sammie’s? It’s not a risk. I’m with my friends, Rosalind.”
Her eyes lifted. They were a pale gray, with flecks of oily black; cold, penetrating eyes that missed little and forgave nothing. “Your friends hurt you today.”
“It was an accident!” Pardell snapped. “My friends look out for me—they always have. With them, I can be myself and not some—” the word died on his tongue.
“Freak?”
It shouldn’t hurt from her, Pardell told himself fiercely, not when he thought it all the time himself.
But it did.
Rosalind reached for his hand. He put his fingers into her gloved prosthesis carefully, slowly—forgiveness—remembering all the times she’d been the one to bandage his knee or some other scrape, or help fit a new-to-him suit as he grew out of the old pieces. Her loss had given her the ability to touch him, and he would never forget that comfort. “I don’t want to upset you, young Aaron,” she told him, her voice softer than usual, almost gentle. “But sometimes you need reminding. You slide a cable so fine it scares me—it scares all of your friends.”
Pardell took back his hand. “What do you want me to do, Rosalind? Lock myself on board the ’Mate? Use the comm as my only way to interact with others? Don’t you think this—” he held up his hand and stripped off its glove, feeling the cold touch of air; beneath, his skin was pale and clean, veined under its surface in faint gold, like the imperfections in marble “—is punishment enough, without making it completely impossible for me to have a normal life?” He sighed and looked at her. “There’s such a thing as being too safe.”
“There’s such a thing as being not safe at all, young Aaron,” Rosalind turned his words back on him, her eyes full of foreboding.
“The Earthers,” Pardell sighed again as he pulled on the glove, feeling exposed without the covering even though it did nothing to protect him from touch. “I’m not a fool. While it would be nice if the Aaron Luis Pardell they hunt has inherited controlling shares in a major Earth conglomerate, maybe TerraCor itself, everyone knows there’s nothing about me worth anyone’s attention but my—condition. Unless you’re planning to tell me it’s my wealth.” His wave extended to include the galley around them and, by that, the dead ship herself.
Rosalind merely looked pensive, as if he’d given her something new to consider. “Don’t undervalue the old girl,” was all she said.
“And don’t underestimate the curiosity value of a mutation,” he said sharply, refusing to be distracted. “What else could it be? They’ve always been after the station to report any deformities or sickness—we all know it’s to justify how Earth treats us here—now somehow they’ve heard about me. Sure, they’ll pay me. Anything to have a freak to show off.”
“Obvious,” Rosalind agreed, then added deliberately: “Is the obvious always valid?”
Pardell’s thoughts fractured and re-formed, as she’d intended, and he squinted at her. “You know something about these Earthers,” he said suspiciously. “What?”
Servo fingers stroked their paddle counterpart. “Not as much as either of us would like,” Rosalind began by admitting. “I know their ship, the Seeker. She was shown off last year by Titan University’s Works Department as some sort of marvel—a prototype research vessel, crammed full of the latest scanning gear and who knows what else. This is her first recorded departure from Sol System, although her captain and crew have deep-space experience. And I know Professor Gail Veronika Ashton Smith, of more disciplines than are worth mentioning—if only by reputation.”
“And—” Pardell prompted, his mind’s eye flashing on a small, round face with determined blue eyes and a hint of dimples.
“Smith is said to be exceptionally brilliant, to have alienated or left behind most of Earth’s academic community, and apparently has one mission in life—to destroy the Quill.”
“The Quill?” Pardell made a grimace and tilted his homemade chair back to consider this. The ’Mate had long ago succumbed to the practicalities of furnishings that could come and go with the people using them
. Rosalind had hated it when Raner ripped out the retractable stools and traded their mechanisms for medicines; Pardell remembered the day as one of their more memorable arguments. He’d hidden in the abandoned bridge. “Then—why me?” he asked her, now thoroughly puzzled. “I don’t know anything about the Quill beyond what comes through station scuttlebutt. They’re giants with googly eyes and long tentacles, last I heard.”
“Or they were never a threat at all.”
“Pardon?”
“You heard me.” Rosalind made a sharp metallic sound by tapping a finger against the tabletop, demanding his attention. “There are those who believe Earth deliberately planted rumors about contamination to cover up their own failure—that the terraforming engineers couldn’t do what they promised and the worlds weren’t ready. No alien invasion, no fatal Quill Effect. Simple incompetence. And if it were true—how long do you think any of us would stand for what’s happened as a result?”
The Quill, a hoax? Pardell stared at her, then sniffed, then finally broke out in a laugh he could no more help than he could fly. “You’ve been Outside too long, Rosalind. You can’t have it both ways—if there are no Quill, why would Earth send Smith to destroy them? And what about all those who never returned from the contaminated worlds? Are you saying they were ambushed—or kidnapped—by embarrassed engineers?” He managed not to laugh again—her expression having gone from tolerant to that icy glare those pale eyes delivered so well. “Well, think about it, Rosalind,” he said persuasively. “How could a cover story that caused mass panic and hysteria, that cost all those lives, possibly hold together? People, Earthers or not, aren’t that stupid.”
“In large groups, people are far worse, young Aaron. I’m sure you remember.”
He clung to what mattered, willing to grant Rosalind whatever fantasy held her. The older ones were often stuck in their own preferred view of things. “So you think this Smith doesn’t know about my condition—that she’s here because, for whatever reason, she thinks I can help her with the Quill.” A flood of something new coursed through Pardell’s thoughts. So that’s what hope feels like, he told himself, trying to keep it from his face. “Her job offer might be the real goods, after all.”
In the Company of Others Page 8