STARLINER by David Drake

He stood with his foot on a chair seat, a spare old man with a consciously dashing expression. He could have modeled for a whiskey ad. Dewhurst had no doubt that Wade was an actor of some sort.

“They didn’t have suits, then?” Da Silva said with narrowing eyes.

“None of us had suits,” Wade explained. “They’d decided they were going to create their own Eden by hijacking the Delilah to some planet back of beyond. Everybody else was going along whether they liked it or not—and I was the only one in Compartment 3 who wasn’t a Consecrant.”

“The Delilah was a trainship,” Belgeddes said. “The internal passage to the rest of the ship was blocked during the hijacking, but each segment had its own airlock as well. I was playing cards with the Second Officer, I’m happy to say.”

He shook his head with an approving smile. “Crawling around the hull of a starship without so much as a suit—that’s Dickie’s sort of business, not mine.”

Da Silva shuddered and turned his head.

“That,” Dewhurst said distinctly, “is not only impossible, it’s sick.”

“Scarcely impossible, friend,” Wade replied. “The airlocks were in the same position on each segment, so there wasn’t any searching around for me to do.”

He shrugged. “I won’t quarrel with ‘sick.’ But there it is.”

Da Silva jumped up, overturning his fresh drink when his knee slammed the underside of the table.

“What’s wrong?” Dewhurst cried as he slid his own chair back.

“A ship!” Da Silva said. “I swear I saw another ship out there! Just for a moment!”

He turned to look at his companions. To his amazement, Wade and Belgeddes had already left the bar.

* * *

The Empress of Earth dropped out of sponge space for the forty-seventh navigational check since undocking from Tellichery. Second Officer Bruns and his navigational technician held their breath, while Donaldson blinked at the slowly rotating pattern he ran on his screen until called on to oversee a maneuver.

Bridge completed its check and flashed up the star chart.

“Clean!” Etcherly said. Then, as though Bruns weren’t staring at the same display on his own console, she added, “The anomaly’s gone!”

“We’ll still get it checked in Tblisi,” the watch officer said with more emphasis than he’d been able to muster during the period of uncertainty over the starliner’s navigational system. “Something like that, even a little transient, might turn out to be serious.”

“What might turn out to be serious?” asked Captain Kanawa as he walked onto the bridge. He looked as fit and rested as he had since the Empress lifted from Earth, though the pockets of skin around his eyes still looked unusually hollow.

“Ah, sir . . .” said Bruns. Kanawa wasn’t one of those captains who expected the crew to come to attention when they entered the bridge, but he did expect complete answers to any questions he asked about the watch. “There was a flaw in, I think the sensors, causing an anomaly in the star charts during several observations. Yeoman Etcherly pointed it out, and I’ve logged it for correction at our next docking.”

Kanawa noted it without evident concern. He walked over to his own console and said, “Status.”

The starliner’s running display came up at once. Changes since the most recent check were highlighted. Normally the watch officer had the status report on at all times. Bruns hadn’t looked at it since Etcherly noted the anomaly before the previous observation, but it all seemed pretty standard—

“Why’s the engineering hatch open?” Kanawa demanded. “Has the Cold Crew had an accident?”

“Bridge to Engineering,” Bruns said without hesitating an instant. “Why are—”

The Second Officer’s demand through the AI automatically switched the upper right corner of his screen to visuals from the target location, in this case the engineering control room. An engineering officer—Crosse on second watch—waited there while the Cold Crewmen under his titular command were out on the hull.

Instead of the bored-looking engineer Bruns expected to see, the visual pickup showed a room full of men in spacesuits. During watch changes, the engineering control room was sealed off from the rest of the starliner. It formed a large airlock so that all eight men of the Cold Crew watch could enter and leave the vessel in a batch, instead of being passed through the hull one at a time through the normal lock.

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