Starliner(90)

He shrugged. "I won't quarrel with 'sick.' But there it is."

Da Silva jumped up, overturning his fresh drink when his knee slammed the underside of the table.

"What's wrong?" Dewhurst cried as he slid his own chair back.

"A ship!" Da Silva said. "I swear I saw another ship out there! Just for a moment!"

He turned to look at his companions. To his amazement, Wade and Belgeddes had already left the bar.

* * *

The Empress of Earth dropped out of sponge space for the forty-seventh navigational check since undocking from Tellichery. Second Officer Bruns and his navigational technician held their breath, while Donaldson blinked at the slowly rotating pattern he ran on his screen until called on to oversee a maneuver.

Bridge completed its check and flashed up the star chart.

"Clean!" Etcherly said. Then, as though Bruns weren't staring at the same display on his own console, she added, "The anomaly's gone!"

"We'll still get it checked in Tblisi," the watch officer said with more emphasis than he'd been able to muster during the period of uncertainty over the starliner's navigational system. "Something like that, even a little transient, might turn out to be serious."

"What might turn out to be serious?" asked Captain Kanawa as he walked onto the bridge. He looked as fit and rested as he had since the Empress lifted from Earth, though the pockets of skin around his eyes still looked unusually hollow.

"Ah, sir . . ." said Bruns. Kanawa wasn't one of those captains who expected the crew to come to attention when they entered the bridge, but he did expect complete answers to any questions he asked about the watch. "There was a flaw in, I think the sensors, causing an anomaly in the star charts during several observations. Yeoman Etcherly pointed it out, and I've logged it for correction at our next docking."

Kanawa noted it without evident concern. He walked over to his own console and said, "Status."

The starliner's running display came up at once. Changes since the most recent check were highlighted. Normally the watch officer had the status report on at all times. Bruns hadn't looked at it since Etcherly noted the anomaly before the previous observation, but it all seemed pretty standard—

"Why's the engineering hatch open?" Kanawa demanded. "Has the Cold Crew had an accident?"

"Bridge to Engineering," Bruns said without hesitating an instant. "Why are—"

The Second Officer's demand through the AI automatically switched the upper right corner of his screen to visuals from the target location, in this case the engineering control room. An engineering officer—Crosse on second watch—waited there while the Cold Crewmen under his titular command were out on the hull.

Instead of the bored-looking engineer Bruns expected to see, the visual pickup showed a room full of men in spacesuits. During watch changes, the engineering control room was sealed off from the rest of the starliner. It formed a large airlock so that all eight men of the Cold Crew watch could enter and leave the vessel in a batch, instead of being passed through the hull one at a time through the normal lock.

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.