Starliner(9)
Lieutenant Holly glanced at the slowly-retracting car and stepped away from the access door. "We'd better keep out of the way," she muttered. "It looks like the whole Cold Crew's in the basket."
The car grunched against the building before locking home. Because of the extra weight, it hit the support step and had to bounce to clear it. The access hatch opened. Men, heavyset and dark-haired, with enough features in common to have all been members of the same family, burst from the car like buckshot from a gun barrel. They crowded into the drop shaft without a word or a glance around the concourse.
Holly waited till the last of them were clear, then stepped into the car they had vacated. "Kephalonians," she said. "Most of Trident's Cold Crews come from there or Pyramus."
"And Bifrost," Ran said without expression as he followed her into the car.
"Right, and Bifrost," Holly agreed. She smiled for the first time and stuck out her hand again. "My name's Wanda, by the way."
"Ran," Ran said, glad for the change in atmosphere.
"They say that if you look into a Cold Crewman's eyes, you can see all the way to Hell," Wanda prattled on. There was nothing hostile in the comment. It was as if she were discussing schools of fish in the Great Central Trench of Tblisi.
"I've heard that," Ran said. There wasn't enough emotion in his voice to make the words agreement.
Under the Second Officer's control, the crew car began to travel toward the Empress of Earth again. "Me, even the Starlight Bar—the observation dome in our nose—is too close to being nowhere," she continued. "I keep out of it except when I've just got to be there."
"Yeah, I can understand that," Ran said.
Normally, a sheet of First Class passengers would have been marching across the broad gangway extending from the terminal to the vessel. Today, the usual procedures were disrupted. A party of ten aides and bodyguards disembarked in a cluster around a tall man with a mane of preternaturally pale hair. A dozen other guards and officials, wearing clothes so formal that they might as well have been uniforms, advanced to meet him.
A slight woman in a tailored dress that flowed like beige fire stood at the terminal end of the gangplank.
Wanda Holly pointed down at the gathering. "That's Minister Sven Bernsdorf," she commented. "The Terran government sent him on a peace mission to Nevasa. He traveled out by the Brasil and then straight back with us. I hope that means good news."
"It's out of our hands, at any rate," Ran said. He stared for a moment at the slight, blond woman waiting for the ambassador. A good lady. He hoped she'd be well, but that was out of his hands too.
Then the car locked itself onto the hatch coaming, and Third Officer Ran Colville prepared to go aboard the Empress of Earth for the first time. . . .
* * *
The initial Staff Side meeting was held in the officers' lounge of the Empress of Earth.
The room was decorated in the style of an 18th-century English coffee house. It had a central table with benches of coarse-grained wood, seats built into the sidewalls, and the autobar was hidden in a paneled kiosk whose pillars supported a wooden canopy.
The fireplace opposite the door was of marble, but the realistic flames were switched off for the moment Instead, holographic birds flitted across the spring-blue sky beyond windows of small, square panes.
There was no reason that the room shouldn't have been of simple, utilitarian pattern, but the decorators who designed the public areas of the Empress of Earth hadn't quit when that series of jobs was done.
Something that to Ran Colville was merely a little gray bird sat on the "outside ledge" of a window and chirruped in a tiny voice. Despite his tension, Ran grinned at the hologram.
His initial reaction to the period decoration had been negative. This sort of nonsense was for passengers, not for the professionals. Thirty seconds later, he found the ambiance growing on him. He didn't especially like the dark, heavy wood and the clumsy furniture, but the lounge had character. A character, instead of featureless homogeneity that could have been interchanged with similar spaces in a thousand other ships.
Character was what made the Empress of Earth special. Passengers were attracted to her for her size, for the quality of her table and the service provided by her human and automated staff . . . but repeat customers and the word-of-mouth they provided came because passengers felt comfortable aboard the vessel.
Interstellar travel was a nerve-wracking business even for a ship's personnel. Vessels still vanished for reasons that could only be conjectured. Perhaps catastrophic engine failure, perhaps collision with debris in the sidereal universe; perhaps a sponge-space navigational disaster that left the vessel wandering without hope of recovery or even of making a planet-fall within the limitless volumes of space.