Starliner(29)

"Wanda, it's all right," Ran said in a calmer tone as he stepped quickly toward the corridor before "Brown" decided to hold them. "These gentlemen are from Central Office. They've got a perfect right to be here."

"Colville," said Brown. He paused for a moment, got an unheard prompt and continued, "Ms. Holly. Don't talk about this, don't even remember it Right?"

"Right," Ran said. He keyed the door shut behind him. For a moment he was afraid that the government gunmen were going to follow him out, but the door stayed dosed. He guided Wanda quickly back to his own cabin.

"What was that all in aid of?" she asked, speaking more calmly than Ran could have done, but the guns hadn't been pointed at her.

"The government—the Federation—is installing an autopilot in the commander's cabin," Ran said. "I'll check that he knows about it, but I don't think it would be a great idea to say anything more about what happened."

"I'll check," Wanda said. "Since it happened on my watch."

"Look, Babanguida called me because Cooper didn't see anything to report, even when Babanguida brought it up," Ran muttered defensively. "And just as a suggestion, that sort of fellow doesn't bluff worth a damn with a hand in the pocket."

"I'll remember that the next time I bluff somebody," Wanda said. She lifted the flat pistol from her jacket pocket, put it on safe, and dropped it back where it came from. "And I'll take care of Cooper. He's got a great career back in Maintenance where he came from."

Ran swallowed. "Look," he said, "I'm shook. I was on a hypnogogue learning Szgranian when the call came, and getting slammed up against a bulkhead didn't help a lot. I screwed up and I'm sorry."

Wanda started to giggle. "You're shook?" she said. "Can't imagine why. Me, I'm going to go change my pants, because I'm afraid I had a little accident when I saw those sub-machine guns."

She sobered. "You saw a problem and you fixed it, Ran," she said. "It's a pleasure to serve with you."

The way Second Officer Holly said that, Ran thought as his door spread shut behind her, he'd have kissed her if she weren't a fellow crewman.

* * *

The bridge of the Empress of Earth was in the center of the vessel, to make the current path for the controls as nearly as possible the same for each bow and stern pairing. The internal walls were real-time holograms fed by sensors on the Empress's skin. The members of the Ship Side command group could watch a panorama of Port Northern, marred only by seams between the holographic panels.

The officers were all familiar with the illusion, but even Captain Samuel Kanawa paused on occasion when he caught the scene out of the corner of his eye and the wonder of it struck him anew.

The Empress of Earth was moments from undocking. Kanawa looked around deliberately now, a tall, spare figure with the mahogany complexion of his Maori ancestors. His blue Ship Side uniform was tailored so perfectly that it might have been cast as a part of his body.

On even the finest ship, in the best-appointed port in the known universe, there was a possibility of disaster on lift-off and landing. Kanawa never forgot that. Before every undocking, he let his eyes feast on the world that he might be leaving in a metaphysical instead of the planned physical sense.

The sensors ignored the Empress herself, so the eight tugs lashed to the starliner's bitts stood like great stones in a neolithic astronomical temple. The tugs were squat and as ugly as toads. Backwash from their own motors had blackened and rippled their skins, and multiple lift-offs and landings every day inevitably torqued their frames.

Appearance mattered only to passengers watching from the terminal as the tugs crawled into position. That wasn't important enough for the port authorities to attempt the impossible job of maintaining cosmetic beauty in the brutal conditions under which the little ships worked. Function was another matter. To the extent that any human contrivance was trustworthy, Port Northern's tugs could be trusted not to fail at the moment their thrust was most needed.

The Empress's autopilot had checked the tugs' location, then calculated the precise vector for their motor outputs based on the thrust each had developed during its most recent use. When the tugs lighted up for undocking, Bridge—the artificial intelligence, not the physical location—would make such corrections as it found necessary.

Seligly, the new First Officer, had checked all Bridge's calculations. She'd captained an Earth-Martinique shuttle, and before that served as First Officer of the moderate-sized starliner Queen of Naples. Though Bridge had never failed and Seligly's background was beyond cavil, Captain Kanawa rechecked the figures. All were in order.