“I understand. You were raised Catholic and you probably also have run into Buddhist nuns and that’s what you think when you see me. We’re not celibate. If we were, we wouldn’t last another generation. God commanded us to be fruitful and multiply, and that’s part of it. It would be unthinkable for any of us to go outside of our own people, such as to university, without first the joining of a family and the sacraments of marriage to impose discipline and also liberate us from the usual romantic tugs such places are known for.”
He frowned. “Hmm . . . That was the best part of going to university, frankly. Oh, well, we each follow our own paths, eh? Have you known your fiance long?”
“Actually, I’ve never met him, only seen a video of him. But I’ve met three of his other wives and they’ve given me a good idea of what he’s like.”
Ari Martinez decided to leave that part alone. He’d been around enough not to be shocked or even surprised at the various cults and cultural systems human beings had devised over the centuries, some of which made totally alien life-forms seem ordinary by comparison. Instead, he decided to keep it casual.
“I don’t remember seeing others like you, and I travel a lot,” he told her. “If your group is large enough to exist on Junctions all over the Realm, I’d think I’d have run into someone else before.”
“You probably have,” she told him. “We don’t travel in uniform, as it were. Not usually, anyway. I carry a modest wardrobe with me, including wigs and such.”
“But you’re not in disguise now.”
“I was, for a little while, but it was too embarrassing, not to say messy. I think in this case I’m better off the way I am.”
He stared. “You’re the girl who took the tumble when we docked! Well I’ll be d—” He stopped himself.
“Damned? I doubt it. That’s the kind of reason we don’t travel as ourselves. People seem to think that if you’re with a mission, you have to be sheltered from bad language and dirty jokes and all the rest. Believe me, there’s very little I haven’t heard already. It’s not what you say, it’s what you mean that counts.”
They went back to the lounge, where the newcomers and most of the rest of the passengers had gathered. Other than returning to the cabin, there really wasn’t much else to do.
There was some milling around and general impatience as the appointed time for the briefing came and went without any announcement, not even that the Captain would be late. Angel looked around and saw Jeremiah Kincaid sitting by himself, nursing a drink. He was hard to miss; everyone who walked into the lounge got an icy stare and a thorough scrutiny from head to foot from the eerie man, as if he were looking for someone who might not want to be recognized.
Ming had departed for her cabin, but apparently had done whatever she had to do and now reappeared, emerging from a passageway. She saw her two dinner companions and started over, Kincaid giving her the remote third degree.
“You know, I’d swear that bastard had X-ray eyes and was telepathic to boot,” she whispered to them. “It felt like he looked right through me! I don’t know what he thinks he’s looking for here. I mean, everybody knows that the monster he’s looking for is a water breather. He should be on the other side, with a breathing apparatus that didn’t work right.”
“You’re not that sympathetic,” Angel noted.
She shrugged. “Hey, I’m as much a bleeding heart as anybody, but it’s not my war, not my fight, and all I want is him to be somewhere I’m not. If he thinks he’s going to spot water breathers here, then he’s gone completely over the edge. Of course, considering how many decades he’s been chasing his demon without success, it’s not surprising.”
Ari seemed uncomfortable, but not with the sentiment. “What do you mean, he should be on the other side? There are water breathers aboard?”
“Sure. In this module. About a third, or two pie sections. Happens all the time. That’s why you’ll eventually hit a wall if you try a complete circuit. You can call them, or use the virtual bar and lounge to interact. I’ve got to talk to a couple of ’em here on business, in fact.” She looked at Angel. “See, it’s pretty awkward for me to go to their element, and unlikely I can do much anyway. Same goes in reverse. So we swap information, research, and such as a professional courtesy.”
Ari nodded. “Yes, it’s done all the time. I’m pretty much between assignments, but if any of them who know me rang me up in my cabin and asked me to run down something, I’d probably help if it didn’t go against somebody I’m likely to be working for or have worked for in the past.” He looked around at the gathering group. “Funny. I always know some of the people on a trip, because those of us who have to actually move from system to system are a fairly small number within a sector, but I know most of these. Not necessarily well, or as friends, but I know them.”
Ming nodded. “I noticed the same thing. The Rithians are all from the Ha’jiz Nesting, for example. And the middle-aged man with the good looks and silver hair and the woman in the sparkling scarlet are the Kharkovs. Gem cutters and master jewelers. That’s no coincidence.”
“I agree,” Ari replied. “And there are others here who are even a bit darker. That Geldorian, for example, is Tann Nakitt. He’s a go-between for various factions, whether it be companies or criminal groups or whatever. Not a bad sort, really, unless you’re opposed to him, but he’s also not cheap. I don’t know the Mallegestors, nor much about them as a race or culture, but it’s curious to see them this far afield. Assuming we can discount Mom and Dad and the two kids there, the distinguished-looking fellow with the goatee and the two overbuilt young ladies is Jules Wallinchky, a man who makes a lot of money providing goods and services to folks who want things they can’t legally have. I assume that the two with him are either recent acquisitions or kept because of their looks and attitude, although you never know.
Makes for an interesting mostly rogue’s gallery, though, doesn’t it?”
Angel recognized the man identified as the gangster as the one who had tried coming on to her until she did her ungainly spill. I sure attract the odd ones, she thought sourly, although she wondered what interest he might have in the likes of her, with two superior warm bodies like those hanging on his every word and gesture. On the other hand, maybe he was looking for a woman who wouldn’t pass a light beam in one ear and out the other. She’d never seen women like this, and only heard of them in stories and warnings; she did not understand why they would put themselves in that kind of situation, as little more than, well, property. She knew some faiths had women subordinated because of Eve’s corruption, but this had nothing to do with religion or true culture. To Angel Kobe, it was as inexplicable as the bipedal hippos over there, the Mallegestors.
“Well, I don’t care what the rules are,” Wallinchky said loud enough for all to hear. “If the Captain’s gonna stand us all up without so much as a word, he can damned well come find me when he wants to talk. I’ll give him five minutes and that’s it. Then we’re goin’ to the cabin!”
Tough guy or not, this sentiment was pretty much universal for the assembled passengers.
Jeremiah Kincaid arose, his huge form towering over the Terrans and Rithians, and made his way silently through the increasingly impatient throng to the restaurant. As soon as he stepped inside, the maitre d’ appeared.
“The Captain has allowed the passengers to wait without sending any word for more than a half hour,” Kincaid told the hologram in his deep baritone. “Please check and see if there is anything wrong.”
The maitre d’ seemed to freeze, but Kincaid’s words went through the generated character to the central module computer and from there to the master computer. Suddenly the hologram came to life once more, looking concerned. “We do not have a clear fix on Captain Dukodny. This is unprecedented. Validate that you are Jeremiah Wong Kincaid, passenger?”
“Yes, I am Kincaid.”
“Do you still hold captain’s papers?”
“Yes, although I couldn’t legally take command without going through a recertification. It has been a long time since I was master of anything large and complex, and technology has gone on.”
“Captain, you are the most qualified individual other than Captain Dukodny aboard. We would like you to go up to the bridge and see if there has been some kind of problem we cannot monitor.”
Kincaid nodded. “That is what I had in mind. What do your sensors see on the bridge?”
“Normal operation is reported, although there is some sort of weight imbalance we can not properly categorize.”
Kincaid frowned. “Weight imbalance? You mean at the bridge?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Wait here a moment. Then we will go up there.”
Kincaid turned and walked back to the people in the lounge, most of whom reacted nervously or recoiled from his powerful and mysterious visage.
“Citizens of the Realm, there might be a problem here,” he announced as loudly as possible. “I would not feel bound to wait around here any longer. On the other hand, I should like a couple of volunteers to accompany me to the bridge to check on the Captain. I fear he may be ill or worse.”
That got a lot of them agitated, and he moved to calm them down. “Please! This ship runs without live intervention. The ship’s Master is the boss, but doesn’t run the day-to-day operations. I am rated as captain and could do what little is necessary in a pinch, but this ship not only can do everything by itself, it has three to five levels of redundancy. There is no danger to us from that quarter. Still, something is amiss. Would anyone like to accompany me? Anyone?”
He wasn’t exactly the kind you willingly jumped up and volunteered to go off with into the internal bowels of a strange ship. Most of them would have preferred if he sat in a different room. Still, curiosity overcame a few of the courageous.
“I’ll go up with you,” said a Rithian, perhaps the one, Angel thought, she had talked to about Kincaid. The cobra-faced quadruped was welcome, because Rithians were so supple they could twist and bend as if they had no bones and get in and out of tight places.
“Fine. And one more?”
“I’ll come with you,” Angel heard herself saying. Was she the same person who had not long before been terrified at the very sight of this man? Perhaps being herself was always best; that way she could place herself in God’s hands.
Kincaid wasn’t too thrilled with her, but he didn’t want to wait much longer. “All right. You two come with me. Everybody else, stay or go as you please. We’ll report as soon as we know anything.”
They walked back over to the restaurant. The maitre d’ was nowhere in sight. Instead they were met by a tall, tough-looking man in a utility jumpsuit. This was crewman mode, and meant that this particular hologram wasn’t from the module computer but from the City of Modar itself.
In addition to curiosity, Angel had volunteered because it looked to be a chance to see the parts of the ship otherwise barred to passengers.
They walked back along utilitarian service corridors that had no mystery in them at all except perhaps where they went, and finally the trio reached a stair that descended from the ceiling as they approached. Without the computer authorizing things, nobody could have gotten up there or even noticed that the stairway existed. This was Officer Country, even though there was only one officer on the whole massive structure.
They went up it, the holographic crewman and Kincaid in the lead, then the Rithian, with Angel bringing up the rear. They came to an airlock with its warning lights flashing red.
“That’s odd,” the crewman commented. “Our sensors indicate that the external corridor is fully pressurized.”
Kincaid looked around. “Any emergency gear here?”
“In the compartment there. Just use the floor ring and lift up.”
Inside were several safety harnesses, two environment suits, and a number of autofit breathing masks.
“There is no suit that would handle my form,” the Rithian noted. “I shall be all right with the breather and safety line.”
“That should be all right for all of us,” Kincaid replied. “If it’s a vacuum, the airlock will either refuse to open or be shut again by the pressure here. I doubt if there are any lines for toxic gases in there. Everybody get on a safety harness and hook to the railing here. Then pull up a breather and hold it. Okay, good. Check your masks.”
Angel had never had one on, but it seemed simple enough to do, and the mask over her nose and mouth fitted itself to the contours of her face and fed oxygen-rich air. The Rithian also hooked up, and the mask contoured even to its snakelike face. Kincaid nodded to the crewman and said, “Open it.”
Warning bells sounded as the airlock was opened while still in a red condition, but the rounded airlock twisted like a spiral lens and opened onto the nearly kilometer-long tunnel that linked the passenger module to the bridge on the main ship.
Water gushed out in an enormous rush and washed over them, knocking all three of them down. The harnesses, clipped to the railings, held them in place for what seemed like eternity but was actually no more than a minute or two. The water itself was salty and mineral-rich, but it wasn’t the main problem, as it was vented and recaptured by the ship’s systems and slowly went down to a trickle.
It was so unexpected that Angel had been completely bowled over, and she knew that it had been sufficient to probably cause some bruises.
“Everybody all right?” Kincaid shouted, picking himself up.
Only the crewman stood there, looking totally confused. “We are shifting the water out through vents to the main tanks,” he assured them. “Restoring normal operation should happen in a matter of minutes. It is, however, very confusing. This is impossible. It cannot happen.”
“Your sensor systems were bypassed,” Kincaid told the crewman. “It was probably done outside, while we were in station-keeping. Was any maintenance done on your overall systems?”
“Just the usual preventive maintenance and refreshing of systems. Nothing major.”
“But somebody or some maintenance robot had access to the computer memory section or comm interfaces?”
“Well, that is not unheard of, but any shutdowns or modifications would be logged.”
“Is there any way to pump this amount of water under pressure into the catwalk from either this module or the main ship’s module?”
“No. It would have to have been done externally.”
Angel managed to stand up, then removed her mask and tried to get her bearings. Her eyes hurt from the mineral salts, and her robe felt like a soaking wet blanket.
She looked around, appalled at the implications. “So where’s the Captain?” she asked them, shaking her head.
“Where indeed?” echoed Kincaid.
On the Freighter City of Modar
“YOUR SENSORS WERE OBVIOUSLY DISABLED ON THE CATWALK,” Jeremiah Kincaid said to the holographic crewman. “And your view of the bridge is obviously also false, probably a looped recording. Assuming that this is true for the sake of argument, is there any way you can physically determine the actual contents of the bridge void?”
“I have already gone to work on that,” the crewman replied. “A routine air-cleaning robot was dispatched into the ducting and reports the ducts on the deck level are flooded to the emergency lock stop; the ones on the top are clear, but it is likely the void is predominantly the same fluid as was in the catwalk. That is most unfortunate since the salts and minerals in the water are somewhat caustic and can cause damage.”
“Can you pump it out?”
“I could vent it to space, but it would be irrecoverable.”
“The hell with recovery! It’s obvious that it’s not part of the main system anyway. Probably pumped in during the master refueling. It would do as fuel for the engines just as well as the normal gel. That’s probably why you have such a weight imbalance in the gravity enabled sections. The water is shifting with the engine pulses rather than having a steady ooze as with the gel.”
“Most certainly a good hypothesis,” the crewman responded. “It will also mean that we will be short on fuel.”
“I suspect that’s partly the idea. We’ll hold off on going further in that direction until we get the rest of the picture. Vent the water from the bridge and reintroduce the gas atmosphere that should be in there.” He turned to the pair he’d brought with him, who now were simply trying to dry out.
“You two want to go back? I apologize for bringing you along just to get a dunking, but I couldn’t know what we’d find here and I believed I might have needed extra hands or backups or even witnesses. Now I see that the perpetrators are long gone.”
“I could use a fluffy towel and a dry cassock, but I’m game to see this through,” Angel told him. “I think I paid the price to see what’s at the end.”
“I, too, should like to see it through,” the Rithian told him. “I do not like the implications of this, and I would rather have knowledge than allow my imagination to flow as freely as the water.”
Kincaid nodded, seeming pleased. “All right, then. If there was anybody left in there, I suspect they are even now drowning in a nice nitrogen-oxygen mix. I certainly hope so.”
“You may go ahead,” the crewman told them. “I will meet you at the other end. I cannot restore things until you can get inside, since I will need to extend this probe to see what is actually there.”
Kincaid unhooked but did not remove the safety harness. Angel and the Rithian had both already discarded theirs, and neither felt like putting it back on unless they had to. Kincaid seemed to read their thoughts.
“I doubt if the harness will be necessary. It’s up to you.”
“You two go on,” Angel told them. “I will catch up to you in a few minutes.”
Kincaid frowned. “Be careful rushing on the catwalk. You are out of a full gravity field there.”
“I’ll be careful,” she promised him, and first Kincaid and then the Rithian went through the lock.
Angel needed a few moments to slip off the cassock, which was all she had on, and roll it up. Then, by standing on it, kneading it with her feet and twisting with her hands, she squeezed an amazing amount of water out. It wasn’t dry when she put it back on, but it wasn’t heavy and sopping wet, either. It was, however, cold.
There was an odor in the air, of salt and some fairly unpleasant substances that reminded her of spray cleaners or insecticides. That water was foul.
She walked up to the lock, which opened for her in that curious lenslike fashion and gave green lights. She stepped out onto the catwalk, and the lock closed behind her.
The catwalk was another world, almost—a metallic grating for a floor, and two thin handrails, one on each side, the walkway not large enough for two of her to walk abreast. It was in fact nothing more than a great transparent tube with its own emanating light around it, and it seemed to go on and on.
Angel weighed about sixty-three kilos in gravity norm, and was used to slightly more in the heavier gravity of the world where she’d been working, but now she bounced along as if she weighed almost nothing. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as it felt, she realized, but not only was gravity well down in the tube, as Kincaid had warned her, it also varied, sometimes significantly, as you went along. It was disorienting enough that she found herself grasping the handrail and going nice and slow.
Kincaid certainly had been a godsend in this emergency, she reflected. If he hadn’t been aboard, what might have happened to all of them? Not that they were out of the woods yet, but what had seemed icy, alienlike distance and fearsome hatred had been transformed by circumstances into just the kind of confident authority she and probably most of the other passengers would need.