Part 79 (1/2)

You couldn't keelhaul a s.h.i.+p for not obeying fast enough.

And then, because she was paying attention so hard she was making her own head hurt, Black Alice noticed something else. Captain Song had them cruising the gas giants' orbits-Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune-not going in as far as the asteroid belt, not going out as far as Ura.n.u.s. n.o.body Black Alice talked to knew why, exactly, but she and Dogcollar figured it was because the captain wanted to talk to the Mi-Go without actually getting near the nasty cold rock of their planet. And what Black Alice noticed was that Vinnie was less balky, less unhappy, when she was headed out, and more and more resistant the closer they got to the asteroid belt.

Vinnie, she remembered, had been born over ura.n.u.s.

”Do you want to go home, Vinnie?” Black Alice asked her one late-night s.h.i.+ft when there was n.o.body around to care that she was talking to the s.h.i.+p. ”Is that what's wrong?”

She put her hand flat on the wall, and although she was probably imagining it, she thought she felt a s.h.i.+ver ripple across Vinnie's vast side.

Black Alice knew how little she knew, and didn't even contemplate sharing her theory with the chief engineers. They probably knew exactly what was wrong and exactly what to do to keep the Lavinia Whateley from going core meltdown like the Marie Curie had. That was a whispered story, not the sort of thing anybody talked about except in their hammocks after lights out.

The Marie Curie had eaten her own crew.

So when Wasabi said, four s.h.i.+fts later, ”Black Alice, I've got a job for you,” Black Alice said, ”Yessir,” and hoped it would be something that would help the Lavinia Whateley be happy again.

It was a suit job, he said, replace and repair. Black Alice was going because she was reliable and smart and stayed quiet, and it was time she took on more responsibilities. The way he said it made her first fret because that meant the captain might be reminded of her existence, and then fret because she realized the captain already had been.

But she took the equipment he issued, and she listened to the instructions and read schematics and committed them both to memory and her implants. It was a ticklish job, a neural override repair. She'd done some fiber optic bundle splicing, but this was going to be a doozy. And she was going to have to do it in stiff, pressurized gloves.

Her heart hammered as she sealed her helmet, and not because she was worried about the EVA. This was a chance. An opportunity. A step closer to chief engineer.

Maybe she had impressed the captain with her discretion, after all.

She cycled the airlock, snapped her safety harness, and stepped out onto the Lavinia Whateley s hide.

That deep blue-green, like azurite, like the teeming seas of Venus under their swampy eternal clouds, was invisible. They were too far from Sol-it was a yellow stylus-dot, and you had to know where to look for it. Vinnie's hide was just black under Black Alice's suit floods. As the airlock cycled shut, though, the Boojum's own bioluminescence s.h.i.+mmered up her vanes and along the ridges of her sides-crimson and electric green and acid blue. Vinnie must have noticed Black Alice picking her way carefully up her spine with barbed boots. They wouldn't hurt Vinnie-nothing short of a s.p.a.ce rock could manage that-but they certainly stuck in there good.

The thing Black Alice was supposed to repair was at the princ.i.p.al nexus of Vinnie's central nervous system. The s.h.i.+p didn't have anything like what a human or a gilly would consider a brain; there were nodules spread all through her vast body. Too slow, otherwise. And Black Alice had heard Boojums weren't supposed to be all that smart-trainable, sure, maybe like an Earth monkey.

Which is what made it creepy as h.e.l.l that, as she picked her way up Vinnie's flank-though up was a courtesy, under these circ.u.mstances-talking to her all the way, she would have sworn Vinnie was talking back. Not just tracking her with the lights, as she would always do, but bending some of her barbels and vanes around as if craning her neck to get a look at Black Alice.

Black Alice carefully circ.u.mnavigated an eye-she didn't think her boots would hurt it, but it seemed discourteous to stomp across somebody's field of vision-and wondered, only half-idly, if she had been sent out on this task not because she was being considered for promotion, but because she was expendable.

She was just rolling her eyes and dismissing that as borrowing trouble when she came over a b.u.mp on Vinnie's back, spotted her goal-and all the s.h.i.+p's lights went out.

She tongued on the comm. ”Wasabi?”

”I got you, Blackie. You just keep doing what you're doing.”

”Yessir”

But it seemed like her feet stayed stuck in Vinnie's hide a little longer than was good. At least fifteen seconds before she managed a couple of deep breaths-too deep for her limited oxygen supply, so she went briefly dizzy-and continued up Vinnie's side.

Black Alice had no idea what inflammation looked like in a Boojum, but she would guess this was it. All around the interface she was meant to repair, Vinnie's flesh looked sc.r.a.ped and puffy. Black Alice walked tenderly, wincing, muttering apologies under her breath. And with every step, the tendrils coiled a little closer.

Black Alice crouched beside the box, and began examining connections. The console was about three meters by four, half a meter tall, and fixed firmly to Vinnie's hide. It looked like the thing was still functional, but something-a bit of s.p.a.ce debris, maybe-had dented it pretty good.

Cautiously, Black Alice dropped a hand on it. She found the access panel, and flipped it open: more red lights than green. A tongue-click, and she began withdrawing her tethered tools from their holding pouches and arranging them so that they would float conveniently around.

She didn't hear a thing, of course, but the hide under her boots vibrated suddenly, sharply. She jerked her head around, just in time to see one of Vinnie's feelers slap her own side, five or ten meters away. And then the whole Boojum shuddered, contracting, curved into a hard crescent of pain the same way she had when the Henry Ford had taken that chunk out of her hide. And the lights in the access panel lit up all at once-red, red, yellow, red.

Black Alice tongued off the send function on her headset microphone, so Wasabi wouldn't hear her. She touched the bruised hull, and she touched the dented edge of the console. ”Vinnie,” she said, ”does this hurt?”

Not that Vinnie could answer her. But it was obvious. She was in pain. And maybe that dent didn't have anything to do with s.p.a.ce debris. Maybe-Black Alice straightened, looked around, and couldn't convince herself that it was an accident that this box was planted right where Vinnie couldn't... quite... reach it.

”So what does it do?” she muttered. ”Why am I out here repairing something that f.u.c.king hurts?” She crouched down again and took another long look at the interface.

As an engineer, Black Alice was mostly self-taught; her implants were secondhand, black market, scavenged, the wet work done by a gilly on Providence Station. She'd learned the technical vocabulary from Gogglehead Kim before he bought it in a stupid little fight with a s.h.i.+p named the VC I. Ulyanov, but what she relied on were her instincts, the things she knew without being able to say. So she looked at that box wired into Vinnie's spine and all its red and yellow lights, and then she tongued the comm back on and said, ”Wasabi, this thing don't look so good.”

”Whaddya mean, don't look so good?” Wasabi sounded distracted, and that was just fine.

Black Alice made a noise, the auditory equivalent of a shrug. ”I think the node's inflamed. Can we pull it and lock it in somewhere else?”

”No!” said Wasabi.

”It's looking pretty ugly out here.”

”Look, Blackie, unless you want us to all go sailing out into the Big Empty, we are not pulling that governor. Just fix the f.u.c.king thing, would you?”

”Yessir,” said Black Alice, thinking hard. The first thing was that Wasabi knew what was going on-knew what the box did and knew that the Lavinia Whateley didn't like it. That wasn't comforting. The second thing was that whatever was going on, it involved the Big Empty, the cold vastness between the stars. So it wasn't that Vinnie wanted to go home. She wanted to go out.

It made sense, from what Black Alice knew about Boojums. Their infants lived in the tumult of the gas giants' atmosphere, but as they aged, they pushed higher and higher, until they reached the edge of the envelope. And then-following instinct or maybe the calls of their fellows, n.o.body knew for sure-they learned to skip, throwing themselves out into the vacuum like Earth birds leaving the nest. And what if, for a Boojum, the solar system was just another nest?

Black Alice knew the Lavinia Whateley was old, for a Boojum. Captain Song was not her first captain, although you never mentioned Captain Smith if you knew what was good for you. So if there was another stage to her life cycle, she might be ready for it. And her crew wasn't letting her go.

Jesus and the cold fishy G.o.ds, Black Alice thought. Is this why the Marie Curie ate her crew? Because they wouldn't let her go?

She fumbled for her tools, tugging the cords to float them closer, and wound up walloping herself in the bicep with a splicer. And as she was wrestling with it, her headset spoke again. ”Blackie, can you hurry it up out there? Captain says we're going to have company.”

Company? She never got to say it. Because when she looked up, she saw the shapes, faintly limned in starlight, and a chill as cold as a suit leak crept up her neck.

There were dozens of them. Hundreds. They made her skin crawl and her nerves judder the way gillies and Boojums never had. They were man-sized, roughly, but they looked like the pseudoroaches of Venus, the ones Black Alice still had nightmares about, with too many legs, and horrible stiff wings. They had ovate, corrugated heads, but no faces, and where their mouths ought to be sprouting writhing tentacles And some of them carried silver s.h.i.+ning cylinders, like the canisters in Vinnie's subhold.

Black Alice wasn't certain if they saw her, crouched on the Boojum's hide with only a thin laminate between her and the breathsucker, but she was certain of something else. If they did, they did not care.

They disappeared below the curve of the s.h.i.+p, toward the airlock Black Alice had exited before clawing her way along the s.h.i.+p's side. They could be a trade delegation, come to bargain for the salvaged cargo.

Black Alice didn't think even the Mi-Go came in the battalions to talk trade.

She meant to wait until the last of them had pa.s.sed, but they just kept coming. Wasabi wasn't answering her hails; she was on her own and unarmed. She fumbled with her tools, stowing things in any handy pocket whether it was where the tool went or not. She couldn't see much; everything was misty. It took her several seconds to realize that her visor was fogged because she was crying.

Patch cables. Where were the f.u.c.king patch cables? She found a two-meter length of fiber optic with the right plugs on the end. One end went into the monitor panel. The other snapped into her suit comm.

”Vinnie?” she whispered, when she thought she had a connection. ”Vinnie, can you hear me?”

The bioluminescence under Black Alice's boots pulsed once.

G.o.ds and little fishes, she thought. And then she drew out her laser cutting torch, and started slicing open the case on the console that Wasabi had called the governor. Wasabi was probably dead by now, or dying. Wasabi, and Dogcollar, and. well, not dead. If they were lucky, they were dead.