Death of a Starship by Jay Lake Read Free Book Online Page B

the Imperial fleet. That’s what started it
all.”
    “ Ulaan
Ude .” Menard made a mental note of the
name, whatever it might mean. He didn’t have anything like the
right dataset with him on this transit, but this certainly was
another one of those odd leads that had kept the xenic question
alive over the centuries. “Bless you, my son, and my thanks.
Creation is ever full of mysteries.”
    “ Indeed, sir. Thankfully my job is
to get my ship where she needs to be, and fulfill the mission
requirements of the run as a whole.”
    Menard smiled at the other man’s
tact. “The ‘run as a whole’ being me and my nanny.”
    “ Well, yes. We’re a fast courier.
People usually aren’t that anxious just to see their paperwork, so
mostly we carry VIPs.” The Lieutenant crossed himself. “Holy
relics, sometimes.”
    “ And sometimes those are one and
the same, eh?”
    McNally grinned. “Nothing like a
Churchman, Chor Episcopos.”
    “ Nothing like.”
    “ Indeed. Look, do you want to come
up on the bridge in about twenty minutes or so? We’ve already done
our initial post-arrival orientation. We’re ballistic right now for
a systems shake-down and crew wake-up, but we’ll be pulling the
beacon chatter, setting our course toward the inner planets and so
forth. If you’d like to observe.”
    Menard sipped his coffee. Advantage
of a small ship, he supposed. “I wouldn’t want to be in your crew’s
way.”
    “ Oh, don’t worry
about that,” McNally said cheerfully. “We could probably hold
midnight mass on St.
Gaatha ’s bridge.”
    ‡
    Albrecht: Halfsummer, Gryphon
Landing
    It took him almost a month to work
up the nerve to go down to the Sixth Wharf. He had to make mattress
money every day. Most days he made food money as well, sometimes he
ate his seed money. It was a losing game. The whole time, Albrecht
hung on to the codelock key. He’d taken a beating over this, by
damn that made the stupid thing his. He had been avoiding the old
Alfazhi in the marketplace, though. The bugger was too strange by
half.
    Somehow the Sixth Wharf was never
far from Albrecht’s mind.
    Eventually he had a day where the
morning came too soon and he was actually a few credits ahead of
his never-ending financial game.
    He decided to go looking
for Jenny D . It
was something to do, some direction to take other than this endless
circling at the bottom of a well of both poverty and
gravity.
    The Sixth Wharf was a riverside
dock. It was haunted by the watermen who moved barges up and down
the silted, hummocked swamps extending hundreds of kilometers
around Gryphon Landing. As far as Albrecht was concerned,
countryside was the colored stuff around a spaceport, but these men
lived among the creeper vines and the large, carnivorous cousins of
the hand trees which dotted the city. And watermen hated spacers,
with a sort of genial venom borne out of the mists of
history.
    Nonetheless, there he went dressed
as only a spacer would be in his grubby shipsuit and his thigh
pack. The wharf was a narrow boardwalk street footing a set of
docks jutting out into mold-green water that looked to have the
consistency of insulating gel. There were only a few boats tied up,
but the docks were covered with ropes, boxes, piles of rusted junk,
all of them spilling into the right of way. Grubby and messy enough
to give any starship section supervisor heart failure.
    He walked along, breathing in the
heavy scent of the river. Just after sidereal noon, none of the few
people idling along the Sixth Wharf seemed to be in a fight-picking
mood. The regulars must be out doing whatever it was watermen did
by daylight by way of earning an honest living.
    The first bar he came to was The
Newt Trap. Walking in, there still didn’t seem to be anyone in a
fight picking mood, so Albrecht spent two more precious credits on
a swamp beer from a dispenser and stared around at the walls a
while.
    If this place had a theme to its
decor, it eluded him. It certainly wasn’t