The Sirens of Space (16 page)

Suspended above his bed by the antigrav
relay, Cook stretched himself and stared at the ceiling, using the
handholds on the wall to steady himself as he floated over his bed.
Old Captain Boyle had warned him about mint-fresh ships: more bugs
than a jungle on Demeter, he’d said; and you’ll wait forever for
your crew. Cook was coming to appreciate his first skipper more
with each day he spent pouring over progress reports and
specifications.

Ship-shaping the
Constantine
was bad enough, what with the engine
adjustments and navigation overhaul she needed before they left
port. But the headaches his old cruiser caused could not compare to
the migraines that
d’Artagnan
delivered daily. First the elevator doors started sticking,
randomly trapping crewmen as the lift cages floated on endless
journeys through the bowels of the ship. Then the food processors
fritzed out—no great loss in itself, but it forced Cook to send out
for meals for the crew. Cook hated assigning a half-dozen or so
redshirts to waste time better spent working on the ship, waiting
for the commissary to finish fixing “three hundred forty-seven to
go.” If they didn’t ready the galley by the time the rest of the
crew reported, he’d have to make restaurant detail a full time
duty, and that was a step that he was reluctant to take. He
wouldn’t lack for volunteers, of course, but he’d already noticed a
tendency for those assigned to food procurement to gain weight at
an alarming rate.

But the small glitches and petty problems
they faced were dwarfed by the sheer size of the job ahead of them.
The ship was twice the size of a cruiser—fully four hundred meters
across—and every cubic inch had to be brushed up to CosGuard trim.
Cook felt lost in a sea of details with no end in sight. To top it
off, he had only three officers to supervise a half-complement of
crewmen. The more he thought about it, the worse it made him
feel.

Sick of the problems, and realizing that it
would be quite some time before his mind would relax enough to let
him sleep, he took the port-a-comp from its stand again, and
decided to call the file dossiers of all his senior officers onto
the small screen. Except for Mendelson, of course; he already knew
her better than he should, and well enough to write her biography.
Still, hers was the first name he called onto the screen, and he
lingered over her file for several minutes before moving on. Though
only Jeremy Ashton and Bruce Van Horn had reported for duty, the
rest of the senior staff was due any day now. No matter what state
of chaos prevailed in the rest of the ship, Cook thought, he would
know every one of them inside out before they met.

***~~~***

MASON MCGEE PLOPPED onto his bed and kicked
off his shoes. The gray walls felt roomy beyond measure, and he’d
almost forgotten the simple treat of feeling real gravity beneath
his feet. The soft whisper of the ventilator lulled his senses and
he imagined himself on a sandy Demetrian shore, with the breeze
wrapping around him and the warm sea lapping gently on the beach.
He was twelve when his parents died and his brother pulled him off
into space, but he remembered the feast a real planet gave to the
senses. Some day he’d return, he pretended, though he knew the tug
of space would always haunt him.

“
So howwuz the trip, Macey? Bring back
a trinket or two for the house, or did ye let Cyrus curse ye for
squand’rin the family fortune?”

Mason turned his head to see Janey, the
housemate he and Cyrus shared. They’d gotten her from a Ceresian
trader bound for home after making his fortune supplying the
frontier with all manner of contraband. Mousey brown hair hung
lifelessly from her head and her plain, round face had known little
joy. But her eyes always perked up whenever she and Mason were
alone, and he could remember long nights together, sitting and
watching the stars spin overhead. Frontier life was hard enough on
a man, he thought, It must be unbearable to be the only woman for
parsecs around, with no company but two dust-bitten spacers who
were rarely home, and who did little but complain when they were
there.

“
Hello, Janey,” he smiled, beckoning
her to sit on the bed beside him. “Think I’d forgot about
you?”

He reached into a sack on the floor beside
the bed and pulled out a large blanket of finest Rositer
goarstwool. He’d gotten it at the IshCom bazaar from a dealer
specializing in scalping the spacers. It cost a small fortune, and
if Cyrus had been sober enough to see it, he’d have whooshed it out
the airlock just to teach his brother not to waste his money on
frills. Mason didn’t mind being overcharged, not when he could
watch his woman’s eyes light up like fireworks.

“
It’s—it’s— ”

She gave up trying to find words. She’d been
snatched from home as a teenager and never finished school, so she
found it hard to express herself. But she flung herself into
Mason’s arms and gave him her warmest hug, the kind she never gave
his brother.

“
Now if you don’t like it, I’ll take
it back right now. The ship should be ready to go in another day or
two.”

“
Don’t ye be a-funnin me, Mason
McGee,” she laughed, suddenly tickling Mason’s ribs, and sending
him into fits of laughter himself as they wrestled on the bed. “Not
unless ye wants t’see how cold it can get, alone on a rock in
space.”

* * *

The Milky Way
splits the
night sky over Covington almost in half, rising from the northwest
horizon and arching across the heavens like a translucent mask. In
Spring, Old Sol, the star of Old Earth, sets too early to cast its
faint glow on Terra’s capital before nightfall, and by midnight the
distant star Deneb shines fiercely on the eastern horizon, like a
beacon calling through the eerie silence of alien skies. Halfway to
overhead and slightly to the north, too dim to be visible through
the vast expanse of space, the reddish clouds that dominated the
discussions of diplomats far to the east swelled beyond the
consciousness of most Terrans early in the year 2551, looming large
in the minds of a select few.

Hollenbach was breathing heavily. The walk
up Woodhouse Ridge was taxing to a man of his girth, and his breath
was visible in the night air. Above, the moonless sky was alive
with stars; below, the city lights lined the river, and on Capital
Hill the Senate bathed in the floodlights that would keep the
double dome aglow until dawn. Hollenbach found the view from the
ridge enchanting, as he paused to recover his wind. He wondered why
he came to enjoy it so rarely.

But his mind soon returned to the matter at
hand. Two o’clock in the morning rarely found him in the mood for
contemplation, and the meeting awaiting him needed all the
concentration he could muster. Duncan Heathcoate wasn’t the
brightest man in the Senate, but he’d learned the art of discretion
well. Over the last few weeks, Hollenbach had wondered whether he’d
underestimated the man he privately chided as “Old Bluff and
Bluster.” Schiller was smart, but Schiller didn’t know the Senate.
If the Tories realized how precarious their hold on power would
be—Hollenbach could deliver a majority, all right, but with just
two votes to spare—they’d have leverage that Hollenbach had tried
very hard to prevent. Someone with savvy had gone over the
possibilities very carefully, and a sinking feeling in the pit of
his stomach told Hollenbach that the someone would be standing
before him quite soon.

The wind shifted to the north, bringing a
strong gust down the crest of the hills overlooking the Mendenhall.
Hollenbach shivered; he’d worn a thin jacket, and the wind knifed
through it as if through paper. But he didn’t shiver alone for
long. He was busy cursing himself for listening to the local
weathermen when a familiar voice called to him.

“
Emerson?”

Hollenbach looked to see Schiller standing
twenty yards away, at the top of a gentle swell in the earth. A few
feet beyond, a faceless companion stood in the darkness, his
silvery hair catching the distant city lights like a ghost. The
companion said nothing, but Hollenbach knew at once who it was.

* * *

Music blared
over the
speakers in the repair shop, only to die in the sound-absorbing
panels of the walls. Wires and knobs littered the floor and an open
tool box teetered on the workbench, its grimy contents scattered
around the room. Mason McGee tapped his foot in time with the song,
oblivious to all but his work and the music. He’d even failed to
notice when his brother had left.

Outside the repair room hatch and past the
closed bay door, Cyrus hung weightless in the air. Their ship
rested lifelessly behind him, held in place by mooring cables; the
heat-shield tiles of her outer hull were discolored by long use and
the rigors of space. He could hear Mason clanging away in the
distance, repairing the Bradbury Converter—the small device that
regulated the exchange of energy from the ship’s engines into
artificial gravity. On a small ship they needed only one, and if
his mind had been on business, Cyrus would have thanked the stars
that Mason had talked him out of buying a bigger ship. A bigger
ship meant more cargo, but it also meant more things to go wrong,
and it would hardly profit them to haul twice as much, only to have
the ship starworthy for half as long.

But Cyrus’ mind was wandering far beyond the
asteroid he shared with his brother and their woman. He looked out
the hangar bay porthole, toward the stars of the East. He and Mason
knew every parsec of space in these parts. Most of it had already
been picked over by prospectors long before they arrived on the
scene. It took longer and longer to find a good strike that wasn’t
already claimed by somebody. There were still bounders aplenty who
would as soon kill a man as steal from him—and he should know,
Cyrus chuckled to himself. After all, he’d done it himself in his
younger days. He didn’t have the energy anymore; besides, it would
mean arguing with Macey, who was acting more and more like a woman
every day.

But he and Macey had found a strike; it
fairly swam with nickel and copper and titanium, with lode upon
lode of gold besides. The asteroid belt with all these riches spun
around a yellow star. Ten parsecs from this star—just a few day’s
journey, if their ship was in proper trim—was another one. Around
that star spun a world with flowing water and air so sweet you
could taste it.

Cyrus’ jaw hardened as he looked through the
milky cloud that filled the distant heavens. Anticenter from Deneb,
which hung brightly to port, and barely a month away, it was all
he’d ever wanted: a warm place on a planet as peaceful as sleep,
with riches to be plucked at leisure whenever he felt like working.
But their second night there, they were torn from their beds by a
bunch of devil-eyed monsters with slimy hands and screeching
laughs, to be shipped home like naughty children caught stealing
candy. The lizards let them keep the ore stored in the ship’s hold,
but the forty tons of gold they left in the other system went
begging. It was the fortune of a lifetime, and Cyrus had no doubt
that the lizards meant to keep it all themselves.

Hatred turned his soul as black as space. He
stared into the distance, his eyes fast on a starless point that
never varied in the distant cloud, a point he could pick out of the
sky from anywhere in Terra. It was the same point that held his
endless fascination, whenever he found himself with nothing to
do.

* * *

The security officer
walked slowly down the corridor leading to the bridge.
The
d’Artagnan
was his first
assignment on a starship and he was eager to learn all he could, as
quickly as possible. He had to know every inch of his ship, and
there was no place better than the bridge to get started. Though
they were made of standard cloth, he could almost feel his new
lieutenant’s bars shining on his epaulets. He’d been so proud when
his promotion came through; his parents even called by subspace
relay all the way from Earth to congratulate him. And now, he could
finally put his training to use—and on a starship! In his wildest
fantasies, he never imagined drawing such a plum assignment his
first time out. After leaving the Academy, most CosGuard Security
Office trainees found themselves on some obscure rock guarding a
science station, or banished to an outpost along the frontier where
the only excitement was counting the days until the next duty
rotation. Starships usually fell to those who had been around a lot
longer. And though his first assignment—security on a subspace
radar station out of New Calais—won him a citation for anticipating
and repelling a pirate raid on the base, he had no illusions that
this was the reason for his rapid advance.

No, he told himself, the reason he
pulled this assignment was dumb luck. His reassignment to IshCom,
for reasons lost to a computer glitch that left him with nothing to
do on the grandest starbase this side of Demeter, had made him the
only security officer available. And since
d’Artagnan
needed a security officer, the same
CSO computer that pulled him away from New Calais for no reason
assigned him to the starship—also for no apparent reason. He could
only smile at the irony, but he was hardly one to sneeze at
fate.

The command hatch opened and the young
lieutenant stepped onto the bridge. Instantly, he could see that
something was not quite right. The lights should have been dimmed,
but they were as bright as day. Star charts flashed haphazardly on
the small screen beneath the main viewer at the head of the bridge.
As he stopped to listen, he heard annoyed murmuring coming from
somewhere nearby, punctuated by grunts of exasperation.