Starliner Read online

  The starliner's outer hull was not smooth. Apart from the podded fusion engines for deep space operation, their stores of reaction mass, and the hatches for passengers, crew, maintenance, and equipment routing, there were staples in rows running the circuit of the hull at twenty meter intervals. They were the handholds and safety-line supports for the Cold Crew, the men—and the handful of women—who maintained the Empress of Earth's drive engines, riding the hull even in sponge space.

  In theory, the Cold Crews worked with double safety lines. To move, a crewman was to set a new line before he freed the other one. In practice, and especially when the crews were shorthanded (as they were generally shorthanded, even on the vessels of top-of-the-line firms like Trident Starlines), the men did what they had to do to make the speed and bring the vessel in on any schedule that the captain set

  And every few voyages, somebody missed a step or was caught clearing a jet with his long-hafted adjustment tool when the engine sputtered and threw him—

  Out. Into space, or into sponge space, without even stars for final companions. Into the Cold.

  The Cold Crews worked four hours on the hull, followed by eight hours inside for sleep or rest or at least warmth (if their souls could accept it) before they had to return to their duties. The Cold Crews were clannish. They couldn't communicate at all in sponge space, and they spoke very little under other circumstances.

  When they fought, which was often, they did so with the fury of men who knew Death and Hell too intimately to fear either.

  Ran Colville stared, through the clear wall and deep into his past. After an uncertain time he shuddered to alertness again and resumed his saunter along the Empress of Earth's vast hull. He forced a smile, both as camouflage and because he'd learned that a pretense of mild calm helped to drag his soul back from an emptiness deeper than vacuum in the sidereal universe.

  "Lieutenant Colville?" called the woman who stepped from the lift shaft twenty meters ahead of Ran. She wore a fatigue uniform with two stripes; a senior lieutenant, and almost certainly Staff Side Second Officer of the Empress.

  "Yes, ma'am," Ran said. "You're . . . ?" He nodded in the direction of starliner filling the view through the clear wall.

  "Lieutenant Holly," she said, taking the hand Ran extended cautiously in case the SOP aboard the Empress of Earth was different. He'd served on some vessels in which officers saluted one another. It was a matter of the captain's whim, like much else aboard a vessel operating scores of light years from home—and much of the time outside the sidereal universe.

  "Let's get aboard," Holly continued, striding back to the structural pillar from which she'd appeared. At Top Level, it included a crew car as well as the paired lift and drop shafts. "I landed immediately to make sure that the Third Class loading would be under control, but there's always dozens of passengers having hissy fits during disembarking. It's almost as bad as the hour before we undock."

  Ran wasn't sure whether Holly spoke sharply because she felt pressured by the immediate circumstances, or whether she was simply curt in all dealings with her fellow crewmen. There were plenty of Staff Side officers who saved all their social skills for their duties toward the passengers.

  She wasn't a bad-looking woman, not that Ran cared much about looks—or the fact that she was probably a few years older than he was. Personality might not be everything with him, but it accounted for a good ninety percent of his interest.

  Anyway, he didn't mix business and pleasure. Women were always cheap, once you figured out what coin a particular lady wanted to be paid in. He liked women as well as any man in the universe did, but he wasn't about to let his pecker get in the way of his duty.

  The crew car was reeling back from an open hatch on top of the Empress of Earth. The transparent vehicles weren't intended for use by large numbers; the twenty or so personnel aboard this one put it well beyond its listed capacity. The supporting girder of basket-woven monocrystal fibers swayed dangerously. It was unlikely to shear, but it might well jam, unable to extend or retract. If that happened, the car would bob in the polar winds until a maintenance crew reached it from a cherrypicker.

  Lieutenant Holly glanced at the slowly-retracting car and stepped away from the access door. "We'd better keep out of the way," she muttered. "It looks like the whole Cold Crew's in the basket."

  The car grunched against the building before locking home. Because of the extra weight, it hit the support step and had to bounce to clear it. The access hatch opened. Men, heavyset and dark-haired, with enough features in common to have all been members of the same family, burst from the car like buckshot from a gun barrel. They crowded into the drop shaft without a word or a glance around the concourse.

  Holly waited till the last of them were clear, then stepped into the car they had vacated. "Kephalonians," she said. "Most of Trident's Cold Crews come from there or Pyramus."

  "And Bifrost," Ran said without expression as he followed her into the car.

  "Right, and Bifrost," Holly agreed. She smiled for the first time and stuck out her hand again. "My name's Wanda, by the way."

  "Ran," Ran said, glad for the change in atmosphere.

  "They say that if you look into a Cold Crewman's eyes, you can see all the way to Hell," Wanda prattled on. There was nothing hostile in the comment. It was as if she were discussing schools offish in the Great Central Trench of Tblisi.

  "I've heard that," Ran said. There wasn't enough emotion in his voice to make the words agreement.

  Under the Second Officer's control, the crew car began to travel toward the Empress of Earth again. "Me, even the Starlight Bar—the observation dome in our nose—is too close to being nowhere," she continued. "I keep out of it except when I've just got to be there."

  "Yeah, I can understand that," Ran said.

  Normally, a sheet of First Class passengers would have been marching across the broad gangway extending from the terminal to the vessel. Today, the usual procedures were disrupted. A party of ten aides and bodyguards disembarked in a cluster around a tall man with a mane of preternaturally pale hair. A dozen other guards and officials, wearing clothes so formal that they might as well have been uniforms, advanced to meet him.

  A slight woman in a tailored dress that flowed like beige fire stood at the terminal end of the gangplank.

  Wanda Holly pointed down at the gathering. "That's Minister Sven Bernsdorf," she commented. "The Terran government sent him on a peace mission to Nevasa. He traveled out by the Brasil and then straight back with us. I hope that means good news."

  "It's out of our hands, at any rate," Ran said. He stared for a moment at the slight, blond woman waiting for the ambassador. A good lady. He hoped she'd be well, but that was out of his hands too.

  Then the car locked itself onto the hatch coaming, and Third Officer Ran Colville prepared to go aboard the Empress of Earth for the first time. . . .

  * * *

  The initial Staff Side meeting was held in the officers' lounge of the Empress of Earth.

  The room was decorated in the style of an 18th-century English coffee house. It had a central table with benches of coarse-grained wood, seats built into the sidewalls, and the autobar was hidden in a paneled kiosk whose pillars supported a wooden canopy.

  The fireplace opposite the door was of marble, but the realistic flames were switched off for the moment Instead, holographic birds flitted across the spring-blue sky beyond windows of small, square panes.

  There was no reason that the room shouldn't have been of simple, utilitarian pattern, but the decorators who designed the public areas of the Empress of Earth hadn't quit when that series of jobs was done.

  Something that to Ran Colville was merely a little gray bird sat on the "outside ledge" of a window and chirruped in a tiny voice. Despite his tension, Ran grinned at the hologram.

  His initial reaction to the period decoration had been negative. This sort of nonsense was for passengers, not for the professionals. Thirty seconds later, he fo
und the ambiance growing on him. He didn't especially like the dark, heavy wood and the clumsy furniture, but the lounge had character. A character, instead of featureless homogeneity that could have been interchanged with similar spaces in a thousand other ships.

  Character was what made the Empress of Earth special. Passengers were attracted to her for her size, for the quality of her table and the service provided by her human and automated staff . . . but repeat customers and the word-of-mouth they provided came because passengers felt comfortable aboard the vessel.

  Interstellar travel was a nerve-wracking business even for a ship's personnel. Vessels still vanished for reasons that could only be conjectured. Perhaps catastrophic engine failure, perhaps collision with debris in the sidereal universe; perhaps a sponge-space navigational disaster that left the vessel wandering without hope of recovery or even of making a planet-fall within the limitless volumes of space.

  A lifeless box, however prettily decorated, was no more reassuring than the surface pleasantry of a robot whose thought processes were both hidden and utterly inhuman. The officers' lounge of the Empress of Earth wasn't simply an exercise in period imitation. It had an eccentric spirit of its own.

  A ship with character at all levels was likely to breed a crew whose competence protruded at the corners through their smooth veneer. Between them, they would get more custom than mere schedule-keeping and safety statistics alone would explain.

  "Where's Babanguida?" asked Commander Hiram Kneale, head of the Empress's Staff Side. He stood in front of the kiosk, clearly ready to start the meeting.

  Ran hadn't met Kneale before. The commander was a broad man of middle height, with strong features and hair that swept back across his temples like a flow of gray cast iron. He had a resonant voice which civilized but did not conceal his irritation at the missing member of his team.

  "He's on the way, sir," offered a senior rating with the name MOHACKS over the left breast pocket of his white uniform. "Had to make a comfort stop, is all."

  For the purpose of the meeting, the vessel's entire Staff Side—three officers and five ratings who should have been six—was gathered in the officers' lounge. Mohacks had a superficially open face, but Ran hadn't missed the look of cold appraisal in the enlisted man's eyes when he looked at the new Third Officer.

  "If he's late again," Kneale said without bluster, "he can see how comfortable he finds the galley for however long he remains in the crew of the Empress."

  The door opened and closed again so swiftly that it was hard to imagine how the tall man with skin the color of African Blackwood had been able to slip through it during the interval. "Very sorry, Mr. Kneale," the newcomer said. "I found a little boy in the head off the Embarkation Hall, crying his eyes out. He was trying to get into the supply closet 'cause he'd mistook it for the outside door, and his mother, she was some strict religious order and wouldn't go into the Men's to fetch him."

  Babanguida met Kneale's glare with warm, brown eyes as innocent as those of a puppy wagging its tail from the middle of a puddle of urine. After a moment, the commander said in a neutral tone, "Good to have you with us again, Babanguida." Kneale hadn't forgotten anything, wasn't promising anything. He was just holding the matter in abeyance.

  He cleared his throat "Very well," he began. "Most of us know one another already, but there are two new faces. Crewman Second Class Blavatsky—stand up, Blavatsky."

  A plump woman in her mid-20s obeyed, smiling nervously, and sat back down again on one of the seats along the bulkhead.

  "Blavatsky has transferred to us from Ship Side, so perhaps some of you know her already," Kneale continued. "She'll be on my watch. And we have a new Third Officer, Lieutenant Randall Colville. Yes, that's right, stand up."

  Ran rose, meeting the eyes of his fellows with a swift deliberation that acknowledged everyone but didn't delay the proceedings. He nodded to the commander and seated himself again on the bench across the central table from Wanda Holly.

  "I understand you've been running Colville through his paces already, Ms. Holly?" Kneale said.

  "He was in his whites, so I let him field calls while I changed from fatigues," Wanda said with a smile. "There weren't any problems. He can do my work any time."

  "Passengers are pretty much passengers, whichever side of the galaxy," Ran said easily. "The only tricky one was the family of K'Chitkans who wanted to disembark on the crew car—"

  "How did you handle that?" Kneale said, responding with the quick certainty of an autoloader returning to battery after a shot.

  "The birds?" Ran said. K'Chitkans were thick-bodied and had large heads, but their distant ancestors had once flown. They didn't look particularly birdlike in Earth terms, but males had a crest of tall feathers and vestigial beaks were common among both sexes. "Well, frankly, I loaded them into a crew car, went over with them, and made sure they got on the drop shaft to the passenger level. They'd booked the Asoka Suite. I decided that was enough of an outlay for Trident Starlines to live with a kink in the rules."

  Kneale smiled crisply. "A good decision," he said. There was no emotional loading in his voice. The message was in the words themselves. That sort of man was dangerous, because it was easy to believe that he didn't mean what he said . . .

  "Very good . . ." the commander repeated. "Mr. Colville, the ratings on your watch are Crewmen First Class Mohacks and Babanguida. They're experienced men. You'll find them capable of dealing with most situations without calling for help . . . but the responsibility is of course yours."

  "Yessir," Ran said. He didn't look toward the crewmen, but he knew the type well enough to imagine the air of bland appraisal with which they stared at his back.

  Mohacks and Babanguida were clever, intelligent career enlisted men. They'd have their scams and fiddles which earned them several times the salary Trident Starlines paid them, and they'd think they were smarter than the officers who were their titular superiors.

  What Mohacks and Babanguida weren't were officers. They would never understand why some folk gave orders and they obeyed, for all their intelligence and experience. They thought it was education or class or pull . . . and all of those things had an effect; but the difference in mindset between those who led and those who didn't was more basic than background.

  Mohacks and Babanguida were going to survive, because they were smart and skilled and kept a low profile by avoiding responsibility. They didn't want rank, because they didn't think it was real the way what they had was real: wealth and comfort and freedom in their terms.

  Most of the folk who worked their way off Bifrost on starships died in the Cold Crews, or died on shore as flotsam washed up on the shores of sponge space. A Bifrost boy who cheated his way from the Cold Crew of an unscheduled freighter to Trident Starlines' Officers Academy couldn't imagine how someone else could stop because he felt comfortable. Comfort wasn't an option on Bifrost, only survival.

  Commander Kneale's face set. There was no particular emotion in his expression, only assurance. "Most of you have heard this before. Listen anyway. We are the Staff Side of the finest starship in existence today, the Empress of Earth. Ship Side navigates us to our destinations. The Purser's section provides the passengers with the services they require, as they would require them in a dirtside hotel. Engineering makes sure that the fusion drive propels us in deep space and the magnetic motors land us and lift us off safely. All of these things are important.

  "But we are important as well," Kneale continued. The level of his voice had been rising by imperceptible degrees as he spoke. "Staff Side is the lubricant that makes our Empress the success she is. You'll hear Ship's officers mutter that all the Staff is for is to keep passengers from pestering the real officers . . . but without those passengers, there wouldn't be a need to navigate the Empress anywhere."

  Kneale's voice boomed. This wasn't a lecture or even a pep talk, Ran realized. It was a sermon by a fire-breathing preacher so committed to his beliefs that he would willingly die for
them.

  "You'll hear stewards say that they do the real work," the commander said, "while Staff Side just swanks . . . but if the unexpected occurs, if Third Class riots, or a couple starts fighting with steak knives in the First Class dining room, we're the ones who'll deal with it If all the engineering officers collapse from food poisoning, we'll nurse the Empress home. I did that on the Captal de Buch between Lusignan and Arcwell, and any officer who serves under me is qualified to do the same!"

  Kneale stood splay-legged and set his massive fists against the points of his hips. "The Empress of Earth succeeds, and she will succeed, because we of Staff Side will make her succeed, whatever it may cost us personally. If there's anybody here who doesn't think he or she is capable of giving one hundred percent to Trident Starlines if the necessity arises—tell me now, because that'll be easier than having me learn the truth the hard way."

  He glared around the lounge. Nobody spoke.

  Ran met the commander's eyes without expression. His lips were in a state of repose, neither tense nor smiling.

  Commander Kneale broke into a grin. "So long as you know I mean it, children," he said mildly.

  "We know you do, sir," said Mohacks.

  Kneale unclenched his fists and tented his fingers in front of his chest. "Very good," he said. "Mr. Colville, do you have any questions before we break up?"

  Ran cleared his throat. "I intend to be worthy of the Empress of Earth and of the trust Trident Starlines has put on me, sir," he said. The truth was more complex than that, but that was true.