The enlisted personnel were all on their feet before the last syllable was out of the commander’s mouth.
“Where is your family, Ran?” Wanda Holly asked in a firm, clear voice.
“Ma’am, I don’t have one,” Ran answered flatly. He smiled. There was no humor in the expression.
The pause among the ratings dissolved into a rush out the door. Ran started to follow them.
“If you wouldn’t mind, Colville,” Commander Kneale said, “I’d like a word in private with you in my office.”
“Certainly, sir,” Ran said. His face was as bland as Mohacks’ a moment earlier—
And he felt the pressure of Wanda Holly’s eyes on his back.
* * *
The file on Randall Colville came aboard from the mail gig which met the Empress of Earth when she dropped from sponge space into the solar system. The gig, making one or two more sponge space transits than the starliner dared and by braking her slight mass hard, would arrive on Earth twelve hours ahead of the larger vessel—a half day that could be crucial with some information that couldn’t be entrusted to electro-optical transmission no matter how scrambled.
Commander Hiram Kneale read the file as soon as the gig was under way. The new man’s, Colville’s, record with Trident was exemplary. His background before taking service with the line was sketchy and somewhat unusual, but there wasn’t anything remarkable in it. Colville had been born on Earth, in the Aberdeen Prefecture, and had emigrated to Satucia with his parents as an infant
There were no file entries after that until Colville reappeared as supercargo—purser’s assistant—on the Prester John, whose captain had enthusiastically nominated Colville for a place in the Trident Officers’ Academy in Greenwich Prefecture. Colville had started slow in the academy, but he’d proceeded at an accelerating pace and had been rewarded with a Third Officer’s slot on a mixed-load packet that traded between Wallaby, Grantholm, and Munch. From there on out, Colville went from successful tour to success—as was to be expected in an officer assigned to the Empress.
Only . . . unscheduled freighters like the Prester John didn’t carry supercargos, and one glance at Ran Colville in the flesh told Kneale what the holographic portrait in the files had led him to suspect: Colville didn’t come from Satucia, and he probably hadn’t been born on Earth. He was a Bifrost man, as sure as Hiram Kneale had been raised in the lemon groves of Sulimaniya, where each tree had its own drystone wall as protection from the summer winds.
“So, Mr. Colville,” Kneale said from behind the desk in his office. “I hope you’ll be comfortable aboard our Empress. She’s a fine ship. The finest.”
Holographic projections curtained the walls of the commander’s office. Many officers used that luxury fitment to display scenes of their homeworlds or their families. Kneale’s walls were four views of the Empress of Earth, docking on Earth and Tblisi, Grantholm and Nevasa—the major worlds of her run.
On the ceiling was a fragment of the Empress’s bow, framed by the twisted light of sponge space. The hull metal shimmered with the rime of gases which had migrated from the vessel’s interior when she dipped back into the sidereal universe. Ran Colville’s eyes kept flicking up toward that view. His expression was unreadable.
The hologram had been taken from one of the Empress’s lifeboats. The photographer, a Szgranian hexabranch, displayed her genius in the shot, because relationships in sponge space were not what they appeared to the eyes of the body. To correctly judge the direction and distance that a camera—or ship, or gun—would travel on its path to another object in sponge space was a calculation at which the most powerful artificial intelligences failed a dozen times for every success.
Military forces throughout known space continued to experiment. Sponge space was the perfect cover for an attack—if one could calculate where one’s target was.
“I’m very honored to be assigned to the Empress, sir,” Colville said. “I hope I’ll be worthy of her. I’ll do my best to be worthy of her.”
He met Kneale’s eyes firmly, perhaps fiercely. Well, there was no falsehood in those statements. Colville was willing to die trying. That was how he probably would die one day, always pushing harder to be the best at whatever he saw as the next step up, until it turned out that what had seemed to be a step was really a long drop—