Death of a Starship by Jay Lake Read Free Book Online

occupy or even bothered to
survey carefully. He’d stake his ordination on that, though
logically he couldn’t prove a negative assertion. As the old saw
ran, absence of evidence was not evidence of absence.
    Of course when cornered by logic,
dyed-in-the-wool Externalists simply shifted the argument. The
xenics favored asteroid belts, gas giant moonlets, comets, hard
vacuum habitats, whatever flights of science fictional fancy were
common that year. But if any of those alternative theories about
living arrangements were true, they implied, even dictated,
morphologies and behaviors which would be barely recognizable to
humans as life. Let alone intelligent actors capable of jiggering
equity markets and rerouting comm traffic through their influence –
the only evidence, indirect as it was, for xenic
presence.
    If xenics walked among the worlds
of the Empire, the Internalist argument had to be correct, in some
form or fashion. And never mind the raging debates over how they
stayed hidden, whether they were human in any sense, could they
take Eucharist or walk down public streets. As far as Menard was
concerned, there was far too much of the human race living outside
a state of grace for his peers in the hierarchy to be worried about
the theoretical possibility of xenic baptism.
    The angel snorted, muscles rippling
in its sleep as it interrupted Menard’s line of thinking. He
overcame his discomfort and stared at it hard.
    Canine and equine muscle fibers
bundled over spider web reinforced avian bone structures. A narrow
brain case not much over 650 cubic centimeters – fatally
microcephalic for a human – housing feline-derived neural matter.
All that dreadful bioengineering warped into a roughly human shape,
of course. Very dangerous creatures.
    Doctrine regarded the angels as
art, of all things, given that much of bioengineering was quite
literally anathema in the technical sense of that term. All the way
back to its earliest roots, the Ekumen Orthodox church had an
uneasy relationship with technology – God had created the heavens
and the earth to be contemplated in pursuit of His glory, not
remodeled in pursuit of secular riches. At the same time, a
practical churchman was forced to recognize that the business of
the Empire would grind to a halt without genetic localization of
food crops for varying planetary conditions, not to mention the
measures required to maintain sealed environments in space.
Nevertheless the Church had never been at peace with wholesale
genetic manipulation. Even biones with their mainline human DNA
were forbidden baptism and sacraments. Yet these angels were
perhaps the most extreme chimeras ever bred by man.
    But they were held to be art, like
a watered steel sword or a lacquered seat of pain.
    Menard hated the things, for all
that they were beloved of the Patriarch. The Church Militant had
four million men under arms, thousands of hulls, the third largest
fighting force in the Empire. Why the Patriarch needed angels was
beyond him.
    And he wouldn’t be able to move a
meter anywhere in the Halfsummer system without this thing
screaming to the world that he had come from the Prime See,
threatening all with judgment and bloody, final
absolution.
    “ Secure for c-transition,” the
cabin told him in a soothing voice. It was mostly a psychological
issue, Menard knew. He’d never noticed so much as water spilled in
a c-transition, but body and soul rebelled when the moment
came.
    The angel slept through the scream
of light as they left reality for points negative.
    ‡
    St. Gaatha made Halfsummer space about fourteen elapsed days
after leaving Nouvelle Avignon. The ships systems solemnly assured
Menard that eighty-seven baseline days had passed – the objective,
simultaneous calendar of the Empire, inasmuch as objective
simultaneity could be said to apply over relativistic distances and
trans-relativistic speeds.
    As far as Menard had ever been able
to tell, baseline time was mostly used to