Lethal Cargo Read online

  I drank off the rest of my vodka, sip by sip, waiting for the moment when we would be close enough to not miss. Without the radar, it was tough to judge how much separation remained. I was going on what the computer put together. All I could see was the IR blur of the oncoming ship’s plume, at a slight angle to us due to the planet’s curvature. Three thousand klicks. Two. One point seven— “Fire!”

  At that moment, we orbited into night, and lost even our optics, as the shadow of Gvm Uye Sachttra blocked out the light from its star.

  “Motherfucker,” Irene said, banging one palm on her armrest in a rare flash of temper.

  “Try targeting them with the comms laser,” Dolph said.

  “OK. Yeah. That’s better.” Irene’s voice faded into a soft monotone. “C’mere, baby … Target acquired. And … firing.”

  The whine of the railgun wound rapidly up to a screech. A 15-kilogram steel slug rocketed out of the St. Clare’s grinning mouth.

  At the same time, the Traveller ship released a missile swarm. These things launch in hundreds. They are AI-guided, illegal, and incredibly dangerous. They lit up our IR like fireworks.

  My headset popped up an alert. We had finally orbited far enough around the planet during the one-sided “fight” to achieve an optimal FTL orientation.

  “Dolph, orient for exhaust burn,” I barked. “Irene, hold those missiles off as long as you can.”

  My hands raced over the FTL console, powering up the skip field generator. I blitzed through the pre-skip checklist, trusting the computer to do its job. Dolph finessed the nose of the ship around to point in the direction of far-away Ponce de Leon, while Irene worked the point defenses. Maser beams stabbed out at the approaching missiles, and detonated some of them in the vacuum. Others kept coming.

  “Initiating exhaust field,” I said. The skip field generator kicked in with a loud ticking noise that was music to my ears.

  “Initiating acceleration burn,” Dolph grunted. He opened the throttle.

  The main drive grumbled and then roared. Faster than any missile could follow, the St. Clare shot away from Gvm Uye Sachttra, into the black.

  Moments later, our slug impacted the second Traveller ship squarely in its nose shield. It penetrated the shield and the hull thickness behind it. Then, deformed, stressed, superheated, and bereft of much of its energy—I’m going on how our computer reconstructed the impact—it tumbled in a destructive dance through the ship, pulverizing the interior bulkheads, before slamming into the antimatter containment ring.

  Antimatter in greater than milligram amounts equals a nuclear bomb core. A ship like the St. Clare carries a few grams of the stuff. The Traveller ship had more. It is the best drive technology anyone’s ever come up with … but safe, it ain’t.

  Containment rings are built to stand up to crashes and electrical failures. Not railgun slugs.

  The explosion was kind of pretty.

  9

  Gvm Uye Sachttra shrank to a dot behind us as the St. Clare’s velocity multiplied logarithmically, from tens of kilometers per second to hundreds of kps, then thousands. Our military-spec drive could do up to half a gee of continuous acceleration for days, depending on how much mass we were pushing. Red-lining the ship’s mass allowance like we were now, we only had a few hours of thrust remaining. But that was enough, thanks to the skip field.

  Invented by humans. Rah, rah.

  Of course, the Eks invented it too, independently of us and a millennium or so earlier. It’s kind of obvious once you know how it works.

  Still amazing, though.

  The speed of light is one photon per Planck length. So, to go faster than light, you just skip ‘em.

  At present, we were only applying the skip field to our plasma exhaust, accelerating the speed of those particles, so they pushed away from the engine bell harder. The St. Clare vibrated and rattled loudly as the engine tried to punch through the fuselage. It sounded scary, but the noises didn’t signify anything except the stresses the exhaust field imposed on the hull, which were well within tolerances. The loudest noises came when some infinitesimal piece of space gravel hit the force field shielding the St. Clare’s nose, and that was because each hit triggered an alarm. There weren’t very many hits. It was an empty system.

  The three of us on the bridge sat in silence. I drank my vodka in small sips, seeing Kimmie’s blood pooling on the chemically hardened dirt. I would have to write to her family. Explain to them that it was all my fault. She had been under my protection. I had failed her. Thank God my insurance covered crew death …

  “Raising multiplier,” Dolph said, every fifty seconds or so. “Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Forty.”

  He was taking it in big jumps, so we could get gone faster. Each notch sent a hard jolt through the St. Clare, a well-worn reminder that the universe is lumpy, not smooth, at the tiniest scale as well as the largest ones. Down there, you got Planck lengths; up here, you have almost unimaginably vast expanses of nothing with things moving through it, such as spaceships.

  After a while, I checked our acceleration. Every captain tries to accelerate as little as possible, and raise the multiplier as high as possible, to save wear and tear and conserve reactant mass. With our mass fraction where it was right now, it was especially important not to burn too much of our water on the acceleration phase. We had to have enough to slow down again at the other end.

  0.3 G. Good enough.

  I swept my hands over the boards. “Deactivating exhaust field. Dolph, throttle down.”

  “Throttle down,” Dolph echoed. The roaring and rattling stopped. Thrust gravity lost its hold on our bodies.

  “External field up,” I said.

  “External field up.”

  The skip field generator quit for an instant, then started up again, ticking faster. Another jolt shook the ship, this one violent enough to throw us back against our seats.

  The no-name star to port appeared to sparkle. Simultaneously it seemed to dim like we’d hit a switch on it.

  In the instant before we roared out of the system, I saw a dot on the infrared, directly behind us. But I was so tired I immediately forgot about it again.

  *

  I slept, ate. Slept, ate. When I was feeling up to it, I wrote up an EVA plan and put my spacesuit on. As soon as I got out of the airlock, I felt a sense of greater peace.

  The Cluster seen from a ship travelling at FTL speed is one of the most awesome spectacles I know. All around me, the stars seemed to blur and stretch out like streaks of rain on the side window of a car—but this “window” was the skip field surrounding the St. Clare. We were encased in a bubble of vacuum skipping through space, touching only every 1,339th Planck length by this time. The faster you go, the fewer photons hit your eyes. So instead of appearing as spheres or dots, the stars stretched out into a hazy meteor shower of light.

  I have never felt very secure in my humanity. That’s my big secret. Even now, I still have nightmares where I Shift into something grotesque—a snake with feet, a lion with scales—and can’t Shift back. But out here, paradoxically, I felt wholly human. Maybe it was the contrast between me—an organism encased in a scratchy, hot EVA suit—and the vast panorama of the universe.

  My very first FTL flight, twenty-seven years ago, leaving San Damiano for the first time on a troop transport, the NCOs herded us all out on a spacewalk. Ostensibly it was to do a fingertip inspection of the hull. Truthfully, it was to show us the reality of where we lived. In space. I was hooked for life. It doesn’t have the same effect on everyone, but for me, and also for Dolph in a slightly different sense, that day ensured that our army careers would be a mere detour on the road back to space.

  And here I was. While Kimmie lay frozen and headless in the cargo hold, a few feet away from me. She’d been a space nut, too. She would never see the Cluster again. I would have to see it for her. I floated up to the top of the bridge and just hung there for a while, taking in the view.

  The Messier 4 Cluster has an
unusual history. It apparently originated in some other galaxy, got detached, and fell into our galaxy, picking up vast amounts of hot gas and dust along the way. This triggered a second spring of star formation in those clouds of gas. Now, millions and millions of years later, the Cluster has two distinct populations of stars: hundreds of old white dwarfs in the Core, and hundreds more nice, healthy stars in the Fringe.

  I changed my handhold and turned to gaze at the Core. On that side of the ship, the waterfall of light looked thicker and brighter, because the stars in there are so close together, waltzing around our very own black hole. The Core is well known to be a no-go zone for biologicals. The few planets in there are lifeless. Too many X-rays. Of course, that doesn’t stop the Travellers from hanging out there, in their heavily-shielded ships, sometimes hiding literally in the coronas of those cool old stars.

  I sighed to myself. Space is big. Human beings are grains of sand. Deal with it. Move on.

  I took out my tools and started to work on the radar. I repaired the conduit, stripping the shielding to replace the data cable that the Travellers’ bullet had clipped. Then I spackled over some damage on the bridge’s hull, where more of those .50 cal bullets had pocked the thermal shields, leaving nasty sharp edges that you could tear a glove on. When I got done with all that, I was good and tired. My suit liner was drenched with sweat, and I looked forward to peeling it off. A drink or three, and I’d be able to sleep without dreaming.

  I went hand over hand back towards the airlock, transferring my grip from one handhold to the next. I had a tether, of course, and my suit incorporated mobility thrusters in my life-support backpack. Still, this was no time to take unnecessary risks. The skip field extended for no more than three meters around the ship in all directions. If any part of me stuck out of the field, I could kiss it goodbye.

  As I descended to the top deck, I noticed that the view forward was getting hazy. On any FTL journey, the skip field picks up interstellar dust. It stops dead when it enters the field, so you end up travelling in an increasingly thick cloud of primordial dust-bunnies.

  Although the dust spoiled my forward view of the Fringe, its density confirmed that we were almost there. This had been a relatively short trip—just three days to cover 18 light years, plus or minus a few hundred million kilometers.

  On the top deck, I found Dolph. His faceplate reflected the shower of stars. He was kicking a football around. In freefall, that takes skill.

  Ahead of the cargo crane, the Gausses, and the maser point defense system, all of which we had installed ourselves, the top deck stretched as flat as a pool table to the “head” of the St. Clare. When I bought her, the top deck had been a runway for small airplanes, which would have been stored in what was now our cargo hold. Dolph and I had no use for alien-sized fighter jets, so in a fit of exuberance, we’d repainted the top deck and marked it out as a football pitch.

  Dolph had his left boot hooked into the top of the starboard ladder. The ball bounced off the housing of the point defense maser, and his right foot drew back and kicked it again. He swayed from side to side to catch the ball on each return, anchored by only one point. My hair would’ve stood on end inside my helmet if we weren’t in freefall anyway.

  “Want a game?” he said.

  “We’d just end up losing the ball,” I said.

  “I have a theory,” he said. “But first, I have a question.”

  My heart sank. I thought he was going to ask me why I had locked the pharma cabinet. If he did ask, I was going to say it was on account of the refugee children. Just to be clear, Dolph did not have a problem—at least, he hadn’t had one for a very long time. But he did have a tendency to pop too many pills, given an excuse such as his injured hand, and then who knows, we might end up right back where we started. I was going to tell him to tough it out; generations of Shifters had made do without painkillers.

  But I underestimated him. “Did you delete the external camera footage of the day Kimmie got shot?” he said, a touch awkwardly.

  “Huh?” I said. “No. I haven’t even looked at it.”

  “Whew,” he said. I realized that was why he had come to speak to me outside. He had thought I might have gone into the system and deleted the footage for reasons of my own. “Just had to ask. I thought it might be an insurance thing.”

  “For once, no,” I said flatly. “Actually, it’s the opposite. I need to submit any footage we have to the insurance company. Is it really gone?”

  “Yup.” Dolph caught the ball and held it under one arm. “I searched all the aft external camera repositories. The whole day is missing.”

  “That’s … weird. You mean it got overwritten?”

  “No, I mean the actual files for that day are gone. Guess it could be a system glitch.”

  “Why were you trying to look at it?”

  “Aha,” Dolph said. “Well, I was talking to Irene. She swears the rounds that killed Kimmie did not come from the Travellers’ island.”

  “Yeah, she said the same thing to me.”

  “So I said let’s have a look at the footage. Maybe we’ll be able to tell from that. But it’s gone.”

  Dolph had a bad habit of trying to fight Irene’s battles for her. I said, “In all honesty, don’t you think it’s more likely that she just didn’t see the shooter? Mistakes happen.”

  “Yup,” he said, “they sure do.” Reflections of the Core slid over his faceplate like rain as he glanced aft at the cargo hold behind me, where Kimmie’s body lay. Of all the mistakes I’d made in my life—and there were many—this had to count as one of the biggest. I wished with sudden ferocity that Dolph would stop picking at it. But that’s the way he was. He picked at things, endlessly. He could not let go.

  “I didn’t delete the damn footage,” I said, “but—”

  “Then who did?”

  “I don’t know, but there have to be backups. I’ll ask MF. We need it for the insurance, anyway.”

  “Do that,” Dolph said. He let the ball fall and kicked it again. It touched the edge of the maser turret housing and arced away from him. Freefall football doesn’t have that much in common with the planetside game. It’s more like 3D pool. Our ball was made of solid polymer and massed as much as a light dumbbell. It sailed past Dolph’s outstretched leg.

  He came off the ladder, grabbed the ball in both hands, and simultaneously fired his mobility thrusters. He was maybe twenty centimeters from the edge of the skip field at that point. He crashed into the ladder with the ball safely trapped under him.

  “Handball,” I said, when my pulse stopped galloping.

  “Ha, ha. Douche.” Dolph caught his breath. Then he kicked the football at me.

  I caught it on the toe of my EVA boot. We kicked it back and forth a few times, and then went inside.

  10

  I didn’t go to talk to MF immediately. I got good and drunk, and then I cleaned out Kimmie’s berth, a miserable task I had been postponing. I folded her clothes and packed them into her kitbag with her toiletries and her kitschy Earth-shaped nightlight. Lastly I took down her inspirational poster of Mt. Everest. Yes, that Mt. Everest, the one on Earth, where none of us had ever been. 7,200 light years away … you’d better have a damn good reason for making that trip. It would eat years out of your life, and that’s if you ever got there, it being far from certain that the decaying colonies between Earth and here would let you land to replenish your consumables. Basically, we’re on our own out here. But Kimmie had still romanticized Earth, which stands for the ideal of human solidarity. I got moisture in my eyes as I peeled the poster off the wall and rolled it up.

  “Mister?”

  I startled, and pushed off from the crash couch that took up most of the tiny berth. Turning in the air, I saw the littlest refugee child peeking in at the door. She had the tail of her t-shirt in her mouth, as usual.

  “Sorry, mister …”

  It is always noisy on board. Fans, plumbing, and the vastly powerful antimatter contain
ment ring on the aft engineering deck produce a throbbing, gurgling, humming melange of decibels equivalent to standing on the shoulder of a busy highway. The skip field generator’s high-pitched ticking added to the ambient noise. The kid had sneaked up on me unheard. I took a deep breath to calm my racing heart. I really was on a hair trigger these days.

  “How’s it going …” What was her name, again? “… Leaf?”

  “OK,” Leaf said.

  “Did you want to speak to me?” We floated out of the berth into the lounge. This was the largest room on the ship, measuring a whole four meters by two. At one end were clamps for long-distance life-support and exercise equipment, which we had left behind on this run to save mass. At this end, a big screen on one wall displayed an animated Ponce de Leon calendar as a screen saver. The fold-out sofa and table were folded away. You don’t need furniture in freefall. That was pretty much it, apart from some plants rooted in plastic bulbs, whose tendrils grew towards the strip lights in the ceiling. I noticed that their bulbs were full of water, and bright globules clung to their bottom leaves.

  “I finished cleaning the toilet.” Leaf took her t-shirt out of her mouth long enough to speak, and then plugged it back in.

  “You cleaned the toilet? Who told you to do that?”

  “No one,” Leaf mumbled. “Pippa said we should do something to help, since you wouldn’t take her necklace. Jan cleaned the CO2 exchanger …”

  My esteem for the kids, already high, went up another notch. “Well, that’s great,” I said “I appreciate it, although those are supposed to be MF’s jobs.”

  “Pippa watered the plants and scrubbed all the walls and floors.”

  Now that I looked at the walls of the lounge, they were unusually free of grubby handprints and paw-prints, although nothing could get rid of the rips where claws had torn the crash-resistant padding. Well, well.

  “What should we do now?” Leaf said.