His Majesty's Starship (31 page)

“-you had to leave from the same position near our own sun.”

“Right, give or take. And then, the step-through alignment is right out of the plane of the system, so we had to boost ourselves up there-”

“We did the same thing when we came here, Joel.”

“Oh. Yeah. Right. Well, you know what it was like for a small ship, so can you imagine doing it for UK-1?”

“Difficult,” Gilmore agreed.

“Right! And then there’s the step-through itself. We used up every erg we had in opening the point up. Opening one up for a normal ship would be hard enough but-”

“-not for something as big as UK-1.”

“Right! You’re getting it, Dad.” Joel took a sip from his drink and didn’t see the grin on the face of his father, who was wondering if he had ever felt the need to spell out things to Joel’s grandfather in such a way.

“And then there were the controls,” said Joel. “It was weird, Dad! I’m working in flight control and I got a look at the navigation displays. Couldn’t touch ’em, it was being handled by Super-els-”

“Who?”

“Oh, um, Superluminary. It’s the company that the king put in charge of the step-through. Anyway, it takes really strange mathematics to make it work. The generator, the thing that opens up the step-through point – well, the first bit’s easy. It’s kept astern somewhere, but to open the step-through they attach it to a maintenance bot and fly it out ahead of UK-1. Easy. But when they turn it on ... well, they must have invented a whole new language for it – I couldn’t make head or tail of what was on the displays. I don’t know how the computers handled it. They even made up their own characters – all these weird squiggles and shapes.” Gilmore smiled to himself again at the unspoken assumption that, if it could be shown on a display, Joel could understand it. He had been through that stage once.

“As simple as that?” Gilmore said. “No bugs, glitches, gremlins?”

“Well ...” Joel looked around. “There was a rumour, that’s all, so don’t repeat it.”

“As if.” Gilmore leaned forward, mimicking Joel’s wide eyed look of conspiracy. It was lost on the boy. “Go on.”

“There was a rumour that the step-through generator, um, did something, had some kind of side effect, but no one’s sure what.”

“That’s informative.”

“Yeah, but it’s just a rumour and we’re still here, aren’t we? So, how about you, Dad? How’s the ship? How’s the Roving? Have you been down there? Have you-”

He stopped as Gilmore suddenly burst into a mighty yawn.

“Not interesting enough for you, Dad?”

“Sorry, Joel, but I’m knackered,” Gilmore said. “It’s been a long, long day. Look, it’s great to see you, it really is. I’ve made my report to the Admiralty and I can’t comment on anything until they make their official announcement. But when they have, make an appointment with Number One – you remember Hannah? Yes, of course – and I’ll show you over every inch of the ship. How’s that?”

Joel’s face split into an enormous grin. “That’s great!”

*

The orbiting fleet was set to Capital time, which meant that for Prince James it was also past midnight. He hadn’t expected to be able to sleep but he had retired to his room on the off chance that he might.

And then the light was on. He squinted at the clock by his bed: quarter to three. He was sure he had turned the light off. He stretched and rolled over-

“Arm Wild?” he said. The Rustie stood there with two others of his kind just visible outside the door. James glanced at the clock.

“I apologise for disturbing you at this hour,” said Arm Wild, “but we did not desire the other delegates to see. I must ask you to accompany us.”

James sat up and stretched. “Where to?”

“Please, accompany us,” Arm Wild said.

If they had been human, nightmare images of legalised abduction would have been going through James’s mind. Even so, he was uneasy but he had no choice.

“If you insist. Let me get dressed.”

They took him to a groundcar waiting outside the Dome and drove him through an empty, dark Capital. Whether through having good night vision or a low crime rate, the Rusties didn’t run to street lighting. The only illumination was from the stars and the moons, and the shapes of the pridehalls around him seemed even more alien than usual. James swallowed. Now, despite knowing UK-1 was in orbit and was big enough to cause a lot of unpleasantness if anything happened to him, he was feeling actively nervous and he didn’t want to show it.

They stopped by a pridehall. The entrance flared with artificial light and one glance in that direction ruined James’s chances of seeing anything more in the dark outside.

“This way, please,” said Arm Wild. James took a deep breath and followed the small group into the building.

- 22 -

23 May 2149

“It’s ridiculous,” said Samad. He had his feet up on the watch desk on the flight deck – a meaningless pose in free fall, which was why he did it – and was sucking a bulb of breakfast coffee. He wasn’t on watch but Hannah was.

“Do tell,” she said.

“‘We were just passing.’” Samad could do a good King Richard. “Did he really tell the captain that? ‘A shaking down cruise.’ They just happened to have invented step-through, while everyone was looking the other way, and no sooner have they made the breakthrough than they’ve perfected it and they set off on a journey of a thousand lightyears. What happened to research? What happened to testing? Not even a quick trip round the solar system to shake the bugs out first? No.” He took another suck at the coffee. “If, and it’s a big if, if that’s the truth, and UK-1’s engineers did that, then the whole lot of them deserve to be thrown out of the nearest airlock, for the sake of the gene pool-”

Samad was a morning person and could talk more in the first hour out of bed than for the rest of the day. Hannah, who had spent most of the night on the flight deck, felt it easiest to let him babble while she studied the report of the repairs foreman.

The repair teams had worked through
Ark Royal
’s night while her crew slept, and it looked like most of the work had been done. She made a list in her head. Next step: disengage from UK-1, do a test firing of the thrusters, the auxiliary engines, the main engine ...

A priority signal was flashing and she took the call. “
Ark Royal
here.”

It was a grumpy, greying man who looked vaguely familiar to Hannah.

“I want to talk to the senior officer on board,” he said.

“Dereshev, first officer,” she said. “The captain is occupied at the moment.” The captain had melted into his bunk and hadn’t yet emerged, and Hannah felt he deserved the rest.

“Paul Ganschow. I’m the delegate for Starward.”

Now Hannah recognised him: one of her fellow hostages. “How can I help you, Mr Ganschow?”

“I wondered if your prince was up there.”

“On
Ark Royal
? No, sir.”

“Well, he’s vanished and he’s not answering his aide. Could he be on UK-1?”

“One moment, please.” Hannah called up the log of traffic in the Roving orbit. “Apart from ourselves, no vessel has had any contact with UK-1 since its arrival.”

“Damn. Where the hell is he?” The question was rhetorical. “Thank you, Ms Dereshev. Oh, we might be in for interesting times down here, so you might like to stand by.”

“Can you explain, sir?” Hannah said.

Ganschow grimaced. “That maniac Krishnamurthy’s vanished too.”

*

James wasn’t naturally claustrophobic but it was oppressive in the pridehall. The ceilings were low and his head brushed them several times, and the dark red stone seemed to absorb the light. They turned and twisted and walked down ramps and up steps until James was hopelessly lost in the maze of passages, but there was a sense of purpose to their procession that told him he wasn’t being deliberately confused. It was just the layout that the Rusties preferred.

Finally they came to a lift and now James had to cock his head to be able to stand under the low ceiling. The doors shut and the lift started down.

It travelled for about a minute. The smell of Rustie was gagging him, his neck was aching and he had to swallow several times to clear his ears. Then the doors opened and they stepped out into yet another passage.

This one didn’t last long. It curved around into (James felt a surge of relief) a vast, domed chamber. At least as big as the dome of St Paul’s, James thought, and it looked bigger still from the fact that it was completely bare.

And then he stopped dead. Standing in the middle was another group of Rusties, including Iron Run, and-

“Your Royal Highness. They got you too.”

It was some small comfort that Krishnamurthy looked just as dishevelled and bleary eyed as James felt.

“What are you doing here?” James said. Krishnamurthy spread his hands in a wide shrug.

“Perhaps the same as you?” he suggested.

“If you think-” I’m James said.

“Please,” said Arm Wild. “It is important that you see this together.” He walked to join the group at the centre of the dome and James reluctantly followed.

One of the Rusties was holding a small device in one grasper: it touched a control and an image suddenly appeared in mid-air. An image that was ... not a Rustie.

At first glance, it might indeed have been one but James had been around the First Breed long enough to note the differences. Its front legs were longer so that it appeared to be rearing, either in surprise or prior to attack. The legs were more powerful than those of the First Breed and the shoulders larger, more muscular, though the general impression was of a body sleeker than a Rustie’s. The head, too, was bigger, the muzzle blunter. The skin was darker, not as ruddy as a Rustie’s, and smoother with it.

He had seen the type before. It was the same as on the monument up above in Capital, and a common theme in the carvings that covered the pridehalls.

“Another breed,” Krishnamurthy murmured in amazement. “There’s two of them.”

That took you by surprise, didn’t it?
, James thought smugly.

Iron Run spoke and Arm Wild translated. “Iron Run says, thank you for coming. We hope your rest cycle has not been unduly disturbed.”

At three in the morning
... James thought. “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” he said.

“It’s my pleasure,” Krishnamurthy said, not taking his eyes off the image.

“Iron Run says, you are the first humans to come here. Once this place was the command bunker of the ruling pride of this nation, but now it is a museum, a cathedral, a tomb, a temple, all in one. This place is special to us for it is here that we remember the Ones Who Command. This chamber is but part of the Complex of Remembrance.”

James wasn’t sure if Arm Wild was now speaking for Iron Run or for himself: still translating or making it up as he went along. “Tell us of the Ones Who Command,” he said. He mentally appended an “-ed” onto the end of the verb, but he had noted Arm Wild’s continued use of the present tense and, out loud, he stuck to it. The title wasn’t so much a description as an honorific.

The Rustie with the remote touched another control and the laser image of a city appeared around them.

James bit back a gasp: he had been in v-cubicles before but he had never known this scale of immersion was possible. A discreet look around showed no blank areas, no interference patterns. The laser signals had to be coming from all over and were perfectly coordinated.

But he was not here to admire the tech. He turned his attention back to the city itself. It was Capital: he could see some familiar landmarks, including the former park where the Dome now stood. But, where up above on the surface the scenes would have been full of Rusties, here the crowds were all Ones Who Command, all shapes and sizes – a hustling, bustling, thriving community that looked somehow macabre. It was like an imitation of the real thing, Ones Who Command instead of First Breed.

For about ten minutes they silently absorbed scenes of a world that James would never know. The society and culture of the Ones Who Command. They were every bit as varied as humanity: great cruelty and great love, great beauty and great ugliness. Finally, Arm Wild spoke again.

“The Ones Who Command came from the same ancestral stock as the First Breed,” he said, “just as you and apes have common ancestors. Yet, like you and apes, there was that tiny percentage of difference in DNA between us that made us brutish beasts and them intelligent, thinking creatures. They were the first sentient species on the Roving. They built our world’s cities, they fought the wars, they created our society. They built our spaceships and, finally, our prideships. They discovered step-through and they created us.”

The scene changed and they were in a rural setting. A pride of Rusties lurked under a tree but they were subtly different to the ones that now surrounded James. They were shy, skittish. They munched at the grass or fruits hanging off the tree and when the viewpoint came too close they were spooked by the One Who Commands making the recording. More scenes followed and one showed, with blunt candour, Ones Who Command massacring a group of the smaller creatures that were in among the crops. There were scenes of Rusties together in their prides, lounging under bushes or sheltering in caves. What was clear was that they were far from the technologically sophisticated creatures that the humans had come to know.

“Eventually, the Ones Who Command began to experiment on us, as your scientists did on the lower orders of Earth animals. One pride in particular was highly skilled in genetic matters and they took the work further than your scientists ever did. They created us, their First Breed.”

Now Rusties and Ones Who Command were clearly coexisting. James saw First Breed working machines or toiling in fields or running errands. He frowned: they might have been living side by side but there was no hiding who was in charge. In one telling scene, he saw what he assumed was a mixed-species fire control unit tackling a blazing building. The Ones Who Command had breathing apparatus.

Then war struck. Fleets of jet aircraft streaked above them; cities were pounded into rubble; armies marched across the face of the Roving.