Though Hell Should Bar the Way - eARC Page 6

  “Yes, that’s a good idea,” Mundy said. “Tovera, there’s one in the captain’s cruising cabin. Fetch it for Officer Olfetrie, if you please.”

  I was ready to help Maeve into the air suit, but she had no trouble with it. Either she was familiar with suits, or she was an extremely quick study. Given the suppleness with which she moved, I was willing to believe this was not her first experience. She was fully dressed before I’d gotten my torso section back on.

  Mundy watched but didn’t speak except to hand me the communication rod when her clerk came back with it a moment later. I checked Maeve’s seals—all as should be—and gestured her to the open airlock. Turning, I nodded to Mundy—I hadn’t put on my helmet—and said, “Thank you, mistress.” Then I followed Maeve into the airlock.

  As soon as the inner door had dogged shut, Maeve let out a deep breath and said, “Thank heavens! Doesn’t that Tovera give you the creeps?”

  I’d started to put my helmet on, but I paused as pumps drew out the air. “Mundy’s clerk?” I said. “No, not particularly. She’s got something of an attitude; but if it doesn’t bother her mistress, I can live with it.”

  “Clerk?” Maeve said in amazement that I thought was at least a bit put on. “I should offer to sell you the Pentacrest! Prime Xenos real estate!”

  She closed her faceplate. I put my helmet on and latched it in place.

  I clipped the free end of a safety line to Maeve’s equipment belt, then led her onto the hull when the telltale over the outer hatch went green. I watched carefully as Maeve followed until I was sure that she understood the need to set the magnetic soles of her boots firmly on the steel hull.

  I hooked another line for each of us to one of the attachment points near the hatch, then led Maeve into the bow. We weren’t in anybody’s way there and the sails didn’t block our view of the Matrix. The dorsal and ventral masts rotated while we were moving, but that didn’t affect us except to wait while Maeve stared at the movement.

  When we were well forward, I stopped and took her arm. I gestured to the Matrix, then linked us with the communications rod. “This is the Matrix which joins every universe in the cosmos,” I said. “This is everything there is; all existence.”

  Maeve looked across the horizon in front of her. The rod rattled against her helmet as she moved, so I lowered it. She reached down and brought one end firmly back into contact. “What am I supposed to be seeing?” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “if you’re like me, you see dots of color across the whole sky. They’re not stars, they’re not even galaxies; they’re whole universes. The ship travels from one to another, according to the course programmed into its computer.”

  “So it’s like looking through the window of an aircar in flight?” Maeve said.

  “For me, yes,” I said. “There’s some people who see god in the Matrix. Maybe they’re right. I haven’t found god there. Or anywhere else.”

  I shrugged, which she couldn’t see in my hard suit.

  “There’s a few people can actually see a course through the Matrix better than what the astrogation computer can plot,” I said. “Captain Leary’s famous for it. He judges energy gradients by the colors and picks a route with fewer translations than a computer would. Or the Academy solution, either one. I suppose that’s why Navy House picked him for this mission.”

  Maeve turned to face me, then clamped the rod to her again. “Do you really think that’s why Captain Leary was given this mission?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am, I do,” I said, trying not to sound defensive. “He’s just as good an astrogator as the stories about him say. He’s trying to teach me. The heavens know I’m trying to learn, but I’m not sure I’m even on the right page yet.”

  “You see that Daniel Leary is too senior an officer for what this mission is supposed to be, do you not?” Maeve said. She was still staring at my helmet, but I didn’t turn to face her.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “But it’s a diplomatic mission, and the Republic is at peace.”

  I couldn’t be sure of the sound Maeve made, but I think it was an audible sneer. “Relations between us and Saguntum could scarcely be of less importance,” she said. “As for peace, though, there you’ve put your finger on it.”

  “I have?” I said.

  “Roy, a powerful cabal of bureaucrats, unelected bureaucrats,” Maeve said, “have repeatedly sent their preferred tool, Lady Mundy, and her assassin Tovera, to worlds they’ve decided to subvert. You can check this easily enough, though probably not on the Sunray—unless you’re willing to look at material which I can provide you with.”

  She stopped there. I’d as soon not have replied, but it seemed that I had to. I said, “Ma’am, I know Captain Leary was a war hero, and I believe what you say about Officer Mundy not being just a signals officer.”

  That’s basically what Barnes and his fellows had been saying last night. They’d served with Captain Leary—and with Lady Mundy—for long enough to know.

  “But it’s no business of mine. I’ve never been interested in spying—or politics, or anything like that. I just want to do my job and to learn to be a better astrogator.”

  “It could be—” she started to say.

  I didn’t let her go on. “Ma’am!” I said. “I don’t want to talk about this. Right now I think we’d better go inside, because I want to learn more about Hansen’s World. We’ll be landing there in a few hours, I think.”

  I started back to the airlock. Maeve came along, which was good. I was feeling prickly enough that I’d have dragged her if she’d forced me.

  CHAPTER 9

  I was using one of the displays on the bridge to read what the Sailing Directions had to say about Hansen’s World. I wanted to learn as much as I could, but mainly I was focusing on something other than the fact that my guts had been turning somersaults ever since we extracted from the Matrix. We were in freefall orbit around the planet. I was hoping that I’d feel better as soon as we landed; it wouldn’t be hard for however I felt to be better.

  I’d been told that every time you extracted it felt different; and that every time was bad; and that you never, ever, got used to the experience. This was the first time I’d gone through an extraction, but at least the part about it being bad was true.

  The PA system said, “Lieutenant Enery, come to the command console and take the conn for landing.”

  There was a pause; I wasn’t really paying attention. Then the speaker added, “Officer Olfetrie, come to the command console and echo the landing from the striker’s station.”

  I was reading about vegetable exports from Hansen’s World. If it hadn’t been my name—that kinda cuts through everything, at least with me—I probably wouldn’t have heard a word of the announcement.

  Even so, I was half convinced I’d imagined it, until I turned my head. Captain Leary was looking at me; he smiled and pointed to the seat on the back of the console. Cory had been sitting there, but he was heading off the bridge with quick hand pats against the corridor walls. If Enery was coming forward, then Cory was probably heading back to man the back-up position in the stern.

  The striker’s station had a saddle, not a couch. I climbed onto it, noticing that my stomach had settled down the instant I registered the command.

  The display could be run separate from that of the primary station or it could echo the primary. Cory had been using it separately—some sort of communications program, as best I could tell. I switched it to echo the primary, a view of the planet we were orbiting, plus some smaller insets.

  The continent we were over had broad margins of green and dark green, and a gray-brown interior. Some of the darker green patches had straight margins. They must have been enormous to be so clear from orbit. I remembered what I’d just read about the sorghum fodder which, with meat and dairy products, Hansen’s World exported to the whole region.

  Enery was on the couch across the console from me, though I hadn’t seen her arrive. The display shif
ted to bring up the power controls, thruster and High Drive both.

  A schematic of the planet—the same continent—appeared above the controls on the display. Enery highlighted Breckinridge—the planetary capital and largest city—on the east coast. A series of numbers appeared in a sidebar beside the schematic.

  “Braking to land,” Enery announced. She highlighted the second set of numbers from the top—they were time calculations. The High Drive vibrated; the Sunray began to fall out of orbit against 1 g of thrust.

  To my surprise, Enery disconnected the automatic landing program. She lighted the plasma thrusters, adding their impulse to that of the more efficient High Drives, balanced them—and cut the High Drives completely, though we were still in hard vacuum.

  We continued to drop, but against the roar of thrusters instead of the high frequency buzz of matter/antimatter recombination. As we entered the atmosphere, buffeting quickly built along with rattles and clangs.

  My hand was poised above the Override button and the automated landing controls. If something happened to Enery, it would be my job to land the Sunray. At my level of skill, the best option would be to let the computer do it.

  The Sunray slowed noticeably; we were actually braking harder than we had been under computer control. Enery had rotated the ship on her axis as we slowed. At an altitude of three thousand feet we were parallel to the surface according to the reading on my display. We were still moving forward and dropping, but we were in the realm of aircar velocities now.

  Inset in the display’s upper left quadrant of the forward view, land swelled from the ocean. Enery brought the Sunray into a near hover, then reduced flow to the bow pair of thrusters by two percent. We set us down in a concrete slip. The berth to port was empty; that to our starboard held two skeletal ships intended to haul containers of bulk produce which would be hooked onto the frames.

  Enery shut down the thrusters though the water in the slip continued to boil for nearly a minute as the Sunray’s underside cooled. We rocked side to side, and steam continued to shroud the sensors in the visible range. I heard hatches opening, though that let in not only warm air but steam and whiffs of ozone—unquenched reminders of the thrusters’ plasma exhaust.

  “Lieutenant Enery?” I said, opening a two-way link through the console. Ambient noise was still too loud to imagine speaking to anyone without electronic aid. “May I ask you a question, over?”

  “Go ahead, Olfetrie,” Enery said. “Over.”

  I couldn’t tell whether she was irritated or just surprised that I’d spoken. Her immediate duties were complete, and it’d be another ten minutes or more before the exterior cooled enough for people to leave the ship.

  “Ma’am?” I said. “Is there a problem with the automated system that you chose to land us manually? Over.”

  There was no response for a moment. Then Enery gave a tiny chuckle and said, “Well, that’s a fair question, Olfetrie. Since you’re an outsider like me, you don’t know that Captain Leary makes a fetish of manual landings and shiphandling generally. I was just demonstrating that he and the people he trains aren’t the only ones able to bring a ship in, over.”

  “I see,” I said. “Ma’am, why did you switch to thrusters so quickly, over?”

  “We have plenty of reaction mass now,” Enery said, “and we’re about to land in an ocean harbor. Our thrusters and High Drives are both in good shape, but thrusters can be repaired while High Drives have to be replaced.”

  For a moment I thought that Enery had finished without closing. Then she burst out, “I’m not incompetent and I’m not a cipher. I’m the bloody first lieutenant of this ship! Over!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Olfetrie out.”

  “Olfetrie, this is Six,” the console said in Captain Leary’s voice. “Woetjans and Pasternak have put together a list of stores and equipment we need to pick up here. I want you and Woetjans to take care of that. Then you can go on liberty until 0600 hours. Over.”

  “Yes, sir!” I said. “Olfetrie out.”

  I knew that this was the first time Barnes and Dasi had landed on Hansen’s World, so probably the captain hadn’t either. At any rate, he hadn’t directed me to a particular outfitter.

  Cory might want his place back now that we’d landed. Rather than contact Mundy electronically, I walked over to the station where she was working with her personal data unit.

  Tovera moved as though she intended to block me when she saw what I was doing, but I thrust my arm out in front of her. I was a ship’s officer. I had no desire to throw my—minuscule—weight around, but I wasn’t going to let a clerk stop me from carrying out the captain’s orders.

  “Officer Mundy?” I said.

  For a moment she didn’t respond. I remembered Tovera had thrust a hand through Mundy’s display to get her attention. I was about to try that technique, but before I could Mundy turned and looked up.

  “Yes, Master Olfetrie?” she said.

  Well, I’d never heard her put any emotion in her words, so I don’t know why I found the polite words, well, scary now. I said, “I’m hoping that as communications officer you can help me. I want to find a chandlery that will be able to provide the ship’s requirements at the best prices, but I don’t even know if Breckinridge has a data net.”

  “It does,” Mundy said. “And I’ve just connected us with it. Here”—schematic map and list of names appeared before me, projected by her personal unit. The resolution was remarkably high—“are the businesses who offer to outfit starships, though of course the list may not be complete.”

  Well, that startled me. I was glad, of course, but that was a lot of information for somebody just landed on a new planet.

  I looked at the list and the map. Not surprisingly, the establishments were all on the harbor front.

  “Is there anything else you need?” Mundy asked.

  “Well, we don’t need it, exactly,” I said, “but what I’d like would be a list of their holdings to compare with the list that Woetjans will be bringing me. I guess we can just hoof it along the harbor road.”

  Mundy got up from her station. “Sit here,” she said. “I’ll queue up the inventories so that you can go through them.”

  “Ma’am?” I said. I’d heard what she’d said, but I couldn’t fathom it.

  Mundy moved to the adjacent station which Sun had just vacated. “Let me know if you need more,” she said as she resumed whatever she’d been doing before I’d interrupted her.

  Tovera moved over with her, grinning at me. She reminded me of a lizard, and I was suddenly glad that it was a happy lizard.

  Using the station’s built-in light pen, I started scrolling through the first of the businesses on the list—the one to the left of our berth; the other seven were spaced to starboard along Water Boulevard. Woetjans entered the bridge with a piece of flimsy in her hand. I motioned her over and took the list.

  I was viewing not only the inventory of Agnelli Outfitters but also the wholesale price of each item. I checked the next business on the list—Kropatschek and Sons—and found the same thing. And rather wider margins on items with the same wholesale prices as Agnelli.

  I looked over at Mundy, who was lost in her own business again. I had nothing to say to her; she already knew that she’d given me access to the companies’ internal records.

  “Sir?” said Woetjans. She was polite, but she didn’t sound best pleased. “I think we ought to be going. I’ve got a dinner with Six this evening, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to find all the items.”

  “Officer Mundy has provided us with full inventories and prices for all the ship chandlers in Breckinridge,” I said. “So if you’ll just sit for a few minutes and jot down notes, the actual work is going to be relatively simple.”

  “Oh!” said Woetjans, flipping down the jump seat Tovera had vacated. “Well, if you’re working with the Mistress, that’s fine.”

  Apparently it would be. It was still a long list and a l
ot of choices, but I was already getting a feel for where we’d be going. I called off numbers to the bosun and she jotted them down on another sheet of flimsy.

  About an hour later, I stretched and stood up. I grinned and Woetjans and said, “Ready for a trip to Apex Outfitters, Chief?”

  “Yessir!” said Woetjans, getting up from the chair like a crane extending to tower over me. “But sir? These numbers don’t mean anything to me. Are you going to do the talking?”

  I frowned. I was pretty sure that wasn’t the way Captain Leary had seen the business going—send the kid out with the bosun to get a little experience in the way things were really done—but thanks to Officer Mundy’s data and my own experience, that was the best way.

  “Right, Woetjans,” I said. “I’ll do the talking.”

  We stopped at my cabin so that I could change from the slops I was wearing into utilities. I’d expected to go on liberty immediately on landing, but if Captain Leary tapped me for the anchor watch, the slops were fine. What I hadn’t expected was to be sent to represent the Sunray on shore.

  The boarding hold was still steamy and with sharp touches of ozone when Woetjans and I reached it. Any organic matter floating in the slip during landing had been incinerated also, so the atmosphere stank.

  The processed air of a starship underway was clean, perfectly balanced—and dead. I wasn’t surprised that the crew had begun opening hatches high in the hull as soon as we were safely on the surface. It was good to have something real after a period of manufactured air.

  “Hey, kid?” Sun called as we started toward the ramp. The purser’s shop was a small compartment in the aft corridor, just off the hold; he was standing in the hatchway.

  “Yes?” I said. Woetjans had already stopped.

  “You’ll want a saucer hat,” Sun said, “since you’re going off to be an officer. I already put this on your account.”

  He held out a flat-topped visored hat with a modest knot of gold braid on the front. The fabric was white in contrast to my dark-gray utilities.