Starliner(89)

Bruns glared at Donaldson. The helmsman ignored him. He was staring at his own display, a gentle swirl with the delicacy of a mandala. Donaldson's duties were to maneuver the Empress of Earth in the sidereal universe. In sponge space, as now, he could not have anything to do.

"That's nonsense," the Second Officer said sharply. "Besides, you can't tell relative distances without triangulating. Since the—the anomaly's at the same point, we can't triangulate."

Donaldson wasn't looking at either Bruns's display or that of the navigating tech, except possibly from the corners of his eyes. He couldn't possibly have anything useful to add to the discussion.

"Should we inform Captain Kanawa?" Etcherly asked softly.

"I . . ." the Second Officer mumbled past his clenched fist. He lowered his hand sharply. "No," he said. "That is, we'll inform him when he leaves his quarters. But he wasn't sleeping for the three days before we got rid of the—the hijackers in Tellichery orbit. He didn't say much about it, but he's been worried since we learned about the Brazil."

A muted alarm purred, warning that the Empress of Earth was about to drop back into the sidereal universe for another navigational check. Bruns blanked his display in preparation.

"Now that he's able to sleep again," he said aloud, "I think we ought to let him."

The new starscape flashed onto the screens. For a moment, it was a rosy blur of highlights. Then, as the artificial intelligence adjusted to navigational parameters, there was only one red carat, high in the right-hand quadrant of either display.

* * *

"Pretty hard lines for the fellows they dumped into orbit that way," Da Silva said, staring morosely at the twisted fabric of sponge space beyond the wall of the Starlight Bar. "Damned high-handed. Even if they were right, I mean, and I don't think they didn't make some mistakes, artificial intelligences or no."

Dewhurst nodded. "I keep thinking, what if I'd been one of the poor bastards?" he said. "I'd be—well, Trident Starlines would regret it, you can well believe."

"I think . . ." Wade said judiciously. He cocked an eye up at the traveling display which falsely showed the Brasil en route from Nevasa to Earth. ". . . that I'd prefer to be in a lifeboat above Tellichery than in whatever holding facility the Brasil's passengers are detained. Some desert world, very likely. I doubt they'll be harmed deliberately . . . but they'll be concealed for however long the Grantholm-Nevasa War goes on."

Belgeddes swirled his ice. "And better than what happened on the Delilah, hey Dickie?"

Wade grimaced. He stood up and walked closer to the bulkhead, staring out at alien nothingness. "I don't like to talk about the Delilah," he said. "You know that, Tom."

"Would another drink help?" Dewhurst asked sardonically. He plugged his chip into the autobar and dialed another round, though Da Silva was still nursing his rum.

To his surprise, Wade didn't take the fresh whiskey.

"He didn't have any choice, you understand," Belgeddes said apologetically. "They were Free-Will Consecrants, with a bomb big enough to blow the whole ship to kingdom come if Dickie hadn't opened the compartment to vacuum."

"Well, do what you have to and don't brood on it," Wade said with a stiff chuckle as he turned at last to the drink. "I mean, they had as much chance as I did to get to the lock to the next compartment, didn't they?"

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."