There were far more than eight men in the large room now. It looked like twenty or thirty, and more suited figures were climbing down the access ladder from the hull.
They all carried guns.
“What’s that?” Kanawa cried, looking over the watch officer’s shoulder in surprise instead of switching his own display to the scene. “Mister Crosse, what’s going on?”
There was no response. Since the engineering control room was airless, the suited men couldn’t even hear the blurted question.
“Docking display,” the helmsman said to his console.
The mandala shrank inward and reformed as a synthesized external view of the Empress of Earth. Beside the huge starliner was a much smaller vessel of nondescript appearance.
“A Type Two-Oh-Three hull from the Excelsior Dockyards on Grantholm,” Donaldson said, identifying the vessel—a short-haul trader in normal usage—aloud.
As he spoke, the Empress concluded its navigational checks and reentered sponge space. The schematic of the starliner itself remained on the helmsman’s display, but that of the Type 203 freighter twisted into a complex of lines surrounding the holographic Empress in all three dimensions. Data from the sensors that Bridge used to create the schematic were skewed unintelligibly by the alien universe in which they now functioned.
“I’ve heard about people docking in sponge space,” Donaldson said approvingly. “But I never thought I’d see it happen. Of course, if they’d tried to match with us in star space, we’d have had warning and got out of the way.”
Bruns wiped the chart. Visuals from the engineering control room expanded to fill his whole display. The external hatch must have closed, because the figures in the room unlatched their helmets.
“Bridge,” Captain Kanawa ordered crisply, “notify the passengers and crew of an emergency. The Empress has been boarded by a force of armed men who must be assumed to be—”
In the engineering control room, a woman with her scalp shaved and eyes like hatchets aimed a back-pack laser at the engineering console. The last thing the pick-up in the control room showed was the blue-white glare that vaporized its circuitry.
“—hostile,” Captain Kanawa finished in a dry voice.
* * *
“You know . . .” Ran Colville said.
He paused as he and Wanda Holly passed one of the many alcoves set back from the Enchanted Forest’s curving central aisle. The whispers behind the screen of exotic vegetation stopped at the sound of the officers’ measured footsteps on the parquet floor.
“I thought when I was assigned to the Empress,” Ran continued when he was a comfortable distance from the couple hidden in the alcove, “that the duty was going to be cut-and-dried compared to what I was used to on smaller ships. Tense, because of so many people and powerful ones. But dull.”
Wanda chuckled. “Well, we’ve still got half the voyage to go,” she said. “Maybe the return leg will be dull. I’d like to think so.”
“I’ll settle for getting safe to Tblisi,” Ran said soberly. “One step at a time.”
They were both off duty, so there was nothing technically improper for them to be together; but the Enchanted Forest was the most private of the ship’s open spaces, something that had affected Ran’s suggestion for a place to walk and perhaps Wanda’s agreement The park-like lounge contained real tropical vegetation from the worlds on which the starliner touched down, blended in with holographic panels of the corresponding animal life. The result was a score of bowers, set off privately from one another and from the aisle.
A three-tonne amphibian eyed Ran and Wanda from a bed of tall Grantholm reeds. The holographic beast worked its jaws forward and back, grinding the coarse fibers into a pulp that bacteria in its gut would convert into energy.
Ran nodded toward the image. “Not a very romantic setting, is it?” he said/asked.
“Speak for yourself,” Wanda replied with a careful lack of emphasis.
The officers’ communications modules chimed together.
“All passengers must return to their cabins at once,” the ship’s public address system said from several points in the Forest’s hidden moldings. The speakers’ varied distances from those listening turned simultaneous phrases into a series of sibilant echoes. “Do not use Corridor Four. All passengers—”