Static Between Stars — Chapter 23: Costs Stick
The inside of a harvest barge smelled like floor wax over cut metal, which is the smell of a ship that tidies up after its own cargo.
The boarding party went in single file through a hole the size of a man's shoulders into a corridor the size of a street. Fes first with him on her strap, then Hallam with the stretcher folded against his back, then Rook and the rest, and the deck was warm under them because this was a people deck and people decks are kept warm, and up through it came the same regular tread he had felt from the Bittern, the lifts and the loading, going on with the night shift while they walked it.
"A1," Rook said, barely moving her lips. "Talk to me."
"Two minutes of channel left in the jam, after which Zephyr's silence expires and her bridge gets to call anybody it likes. Pressure grid reads normal and boring, which will not last. Hold One is four hundred meters forward along the spine, Hold Two nine hundred, and the vault you are standing under is sixty meters up one ladder well." A pause. "The cradle is spooled, and a hull with a hole in her will not jump. She is, for our purposes, a building."
"Then we have the building," Rook said. "Move."
At the first junction a cargo crewman came around the corner pushing a data cart and stopped dead in the polite way of a man who has found ten rifles in a corridor that is not on his route. Behind him a gray coat came out of an alcove with a sidearm coming up, and two of Rook's people spoke once each with their weapons, and the gray coat sat down against the wall and stayed sat down. The cargo crewman put his hands on his cart. Nobody hurt him. They took his card and his cart, because a cart in a corridor is a reason for a cart in a corridor, and Rook's people put Fes's spare kits in it and pushed it along like a night's work.
A round came back at them down the ducting a moment later, from a security post they could not see, and it opened a cable run above his head and the sparks came down the corridor in a sheet. He put seven staples into that cable run at 0258 and the sparks stopped arguing, and he counted what was left in him and kept the number where he could reach it: forty-one.
The vault was amidships upper, off the spine, exactly as the deck plan had promised, with two doors and one purser's lock that wanted Fes's card and then wanted it again with a second tap, because the Reconciliation did not believe the first time.
Inside, gray shelving to the ceiling, and on the shelving, boxed and labeled in the billing font, the codexes of other worlds. He read two names of planets he had heard of and one he had not, and that is the archive of the room where the desks come from: a shelf of the last legal object belonging to places the charts were busy forgetting.
The case from Ostrell sat on the center table under a lamp, seal intact, and beside it stood the barge's factor with his gray coat and his receipt book open, a man named Ivenne who looked up at ten armed strangers and did not spill anything.
"You will want the seizure register, I expect," he said. "Everything that enters this vessel is entered twice. It's a formality."
"We'll take the book," Rook said.
"The book is on the manifest."
"Then the manifest is wrong." Rook had the case in her arms before the sentence finished, and Fes was at her shoulder with her card out, watching the door, and the factor looked at the seal, and at them, and made the calculation that men like Ivenne are built to make.
A1, over the circuit, while Rook was still getting her arms around the case: "Take it intact and do not break the seal. A sealed codex can be read back onto its row in front of witnesses. A broken one is only paper with a history."
"I am required to report the loss of a sealed asset," he said. "I am sorry. The form exists."
He pressed the alert on his own desk. Somewhere below them a tone went through the barge that he felt in his plate rather than heard, and A1's voice arrived in his ear with the small cup in it: "She is cycling shutters, forward section first, closing corridors to preserve assets. Hold One's corridor has four minutes. Hold Two's has nine. The people in the holds are assets too, and her bridge is preserving them by putting plate between them and you."
"Take the book and go straight to Hold One at speed," Pixel said over the circuit, and her voice had no lecture in it. "If the plate wins, you get out with what you have."
"Doors don't win tonight," Fes said. She was already at the ladder well with the card in her teeth. "Come on, stapler. I want to see daylight out of this hole."
Hold One opened on the second tap of Fes's card, and the field dropped, and eleven hundred and twenty people stood up out of the dark on the far side of it and did not come toward them.
That is the part nobody briefs you on. They had been told the season would turn. They had been told the notices were procedural. They stood in rows in the cargo dark with their bundles at their feet and looked at ten armed strangers and waited to be told which form this was.
"Ostrell," Fes said. She had her helmet off, which was against every rule Rook had, and she stood in the light of the corridor where the shutter had been and let them see a face. "The notices were real. We're the ones who came anyway. Walk at my pace and don't touch the field edges."
Then they moved, and it was a river, and Rook's people became banks. Hallam and two others herded the front. He rode Fes's shoulder through the middle of it and heard a woman ask her, over and over, whether the harbor was still there, and Fes answered yes to every repetition without once varying the answer, because a yes is a rope and you do not vary a rope.
Hold Two was nine hundred meters aft, and they had eight minutes of corridor left, and the plate was eating the ship from the front. They ran it. The shutters were cycling behind them like a clock that had been argued with, and A1 called the numbers as they moved: three minutes to Hold One's cross-junction, two, and at the junction two more gray coats had dug in with rifles out of a security locker, which was the first mistake the Reconciliation had made all night that mattered.
Rook's people took it in four seconds from two sides and one of the gray coats died with his radio keyed and his mouth still open, and the cost of those four seconds was that Hold Two's door arrived to them with its lock alarm already screaming.
Fes knelt at the slot with her card. "Two two one," she said to Hallam, for the next door, for any door. "Two two one and then push, you have to pu..."
The field dropped. Hold Two came up out of the dark, fifteen hundred and eighty-five, and started to move, because a river starts when the bank is removed. Fes stood in the doorway with one hand on the plate edge, counting them through the way you count anything you have decided cannot be rounded: nine hundred forty, nine hundred forty-one. A woman with a bundle going past her said something and Fes turned her head to answer, and said, "Left at the stencil, then the white hole, and don't stop for..."
The round took her in the throat above her armor and she was on the deck before the sound of it finished.
He went with her because he was clipped to her, and the deck came up, and her face was next to his, open and already nowhere. He tapped her collarbone twice with his plate, which is how he says yes. He did it again. Somewhere above them the gunfire was doing its work and Rook was shouting a name that was not her name, and he lay in the corridor of a harvest barge beside a woman who had been given her first afternoon fourteen days ago and had spent it asking strangers what their names were, and the count stopped at nine hundred forty-one with the river still coming around her.
Hallam cut the strap with a knife and picked him up in one hand and carried him on, because the river was still moving and the plate was still eating the ship. Fes came out with them on the stretcher under a blanket, because they do not leave people in the argument. Case number for the night, logged in his head before anyone else thought to write one: Fes, one of the Woken. Status: closed.
"Out," Pixel said. "All of it. The jam just expired and the Quiet Adjustment is asking the Reconciliation why her corridor plan is running, and in about three minutes she is going to get an answer she can act on."
They went back the way they came with the case under Rook's arm and the river of Ostrell going the other way around them, and Hold One's people ahead of them were through the junction and moving for the hole, and the corridor behind Hold Two's door had begun to talk about pressure. A1's voice, very calm: "They have opened the far vents. Fire plan. Your air is going out of your hole from here forward, and when the fire doors behind you close, this whole corridor loses pressure in ninety seconds. Which way the air goes is the only opinion you have left."
The wind arrived like a man opening a door in a hurry. Loose kit went down the corridor. The cart rolled. People went to their knees and were hauled up by people they had never met, and at the hole the transfer bridge between the two hulls was a ladder of light in the dark with the Bittern's hold on the far end of it and everything in the Reconciliation pushing them toward it.
Renna was at the plate on the barge's side, braced in the frame with a breaching shield across the crack that a security charge had opened beside their entry, holding it the way she had said she would, with her hands, while the last of the wounded went over the bridge on their knees. The crack was spreading. He could see the skin of her walking back in a line toward the collar, and the air roaring through the gap, and Renna's boots planted and sliding.
"Clive!" she shouted over it. "The crack! Stitch it, it's walking toward the collar!"
He put himself against the frame beside her and he stitched. Forty-one staples, one after another, into a seam that wanted to be a mouth, and the wind took a data card off the frame and took her spare hose and took the words she was shouting after the first three of them, and she held the shield flat with her forearms while he worked, and the shield peeled out of her hands like a coin out of a poor man's.
She went out through the crack with it. The stream of escaping air threw her across the gap between the two hulls and struck her against the Reconciliation's flank with a force he felt come back through the frame into his plate, and the air pinned what was left of her there, and she did not move, and did not move. There is no air in that gap and nothing alive in it, and he logged it while the staples were going in, because he logs: Renna Sol, engineer of the Bittern, out of the hull with no recovery possible. Staple thirty-eight followed that into the seam, because the seam did not care what he had just written.
Staple thirty-nine closed the walking edge. Staple forty and staple forty-one went in after it because an evidence seal wants redundancy, and he was empty, and the wind stopped taking the corridor.
Hallam's hand came in out of the light and closed around his casing and held on. Across the bridge Osei was saying one word into the flight loop over and over, which was now, and they went over the ladder on their knees with the case and the wounded and the last forty of Ostrell's Hold Two people, and behind them the Reconciliation began, at last, to close her doors on herself.
"The Quiet Adjustment has matched bearings," A1 said. "Four minutes."
Osei took them off the barge's flank at full burn with the grapple teeth letting go of her hull like a curse, and the Reconciliation's point-defense tracked them and did not fire, because anything she fired at them at this range went through them and then through her own skin, and she was, after all, a building with a grievance and no angle. The escort's warning shot went wide of a freighter that was already flat in the barge's shadow, and Zephyr, who had promised four minutes of silence and gotten them six, spent the last of his apparatus on one burst of static across the channel that bought them the length of a held breath, and Osei spent it turning the Bittern inside the gap between two hulls and burning for the dark.
"Count," Rook said.
Osei gave it in the tone pilots use for numbers they would rather not have. "Two thousand seven hundred and five in my hold, standing, by the count of the people who walked on their own feet and the ones we carried. Hallam's burned. Vitto's burned. Two more of yours, Rook, walking. And Renna Sol is not aboard."
Nobody said anything about Renna Sol for a while. The Bittern ran dark with a hold full of people who had been freight the night before, and in the aft corner by the cutting rig nobody touched the cloth where her torch parts lay in the order she worked them, and the cloth stayed exactly as she had left it, and that was the whole of the funeral so far.
They laid Fes in the hold under a blanket between two crates, and no one spoke over her, because there was nothing to say that would not be a lie wearing a good coat.
Osei printed the boarding roster on paper, because paper is what a master signs for a ship's articles, and he put it on the chart clip and did not touch it, and he went along it with what he had left in him, which was nothing, so he reloaded from the slot beside the folded file in his casing and did it properly: two rows of staples driven clean through two printed names, one row across Fes, one row across Renna Sol, so that the roster says what a roster says when the ledger is honest. Two strikethroughs. The count of the boarding party reads ten across the seam and eight walking back, with Fes out on the stretcher and Renna Sol not out at all, and he has logged worse arithmetic and never once believed it.
Osei looked at the roster for a long moment and then at the empty place at the cutting rig, and he said only, "She'd want the seals catalogued," and went forward to the chair, and that was the eulogy, and it was true, and being true did not help it.
The Ephergent came up alongside in the dark to take delivery of the book, and he went across the gangway in his harness with the case beside him, and the first place he went, past the copier and the dog asleep on the comms panel, was the port bulkhead where the old chart is pinned.
Barry's chart. The survey route inked in toward coordinates the modern maps leave empty, and under it the file that still reads status: open, and he had two strips of paper from Osei's printer in the slot with his staples, and he put one strip up through four corners and then the other, and then he drove a row of staples through each name so the bulkhead would carry the same reading as the roster, and he sat down on the deckplate in the dark under three names and one chart, two of the names struck and one of them open, and none of them coming back.
Nobody made a speech. Rook had lost the loudest voice in her squadron and did not gather anybody together to hear her own. Pixel had given the order that brought most of them back and said nothing over the people it did not bring. He has never in a long life made one and was not about to start over two women who would have hated it.
Zephyr found him there an hour later and did not say anything either. He put a cup of something down within reach of the bulkhead, which is his way of filing a row, and went back to his boards, and Clive tapped the deckplate twice after him, which is how he says yes.
The Bittern limped home in the dark with the hold of the rescued and the roster in the clip, two strikethroughs driven clean through two printed names, and The Ephergent was right behind her with a book full of names that somebody was going to want back. The war had bodies now.