Investments (9 page)

A deep gray stripe lay along the strata, a river of mica flecks gleaming in the lantern like a river of stars. “That’s
it
?” Martinez asked. He could span the layer with his two arms. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a pluton.

“Yes, my lord. They had to do a redesign of the drill head.”

Couldn’t they blast it?
Martinez bit back the question.

Of course they could have blasted, he thought; but explosive wouldn’t have added a hefty enough overcharge. Then Martinez remembered, during the party held in his honor at Rio Hondo, a conversation between Lords Pa and Mukerji. Something about the geologist’s report ...

Suddenly Martinez wondered if Mukerji— the plunging gambler— been the Chee Company official responsible for approving the cost overruns. He was president of the company, after all, very possibly he could approve such things.

But Mukerji had never been to Chee— the requests would have had to chase him all over the empire as he went off on his quests for funds. Mukerji had never been to Chee, and wouldn’t have been available to fill most spending requests.

Unless
. . . unless Mukerji was part of the conspiracy. Receiving payments from the conspirators in order to relieve his gambling debts.

“Interesting,” Martinez said.

Ahmet’s eyes glittered in the lamplight, the admiration of one thief and confidence man for a job well and professionally done. “Fascinating,” he said, “isn’t it? Geology?”

*

The question was how to reveal to Eggfont the relationship between Lord Mince and Lady Belledrawers. If Eggfont was told by the valet Cadaver, that would tell Eggfont something about Cadaver that for the present should remain hidden. Yet how else could Eggfont find out in time for the Grand Ball ...?

A token, Severin thought. A mysterious token, which Eggfont would understand but which would be opaque to anyone else. But introduced by
who
?

Severin tapped Lady Liao’s ring on the arm of his couch in slow accompaniment to his thoughts. He had to admit that his invention was flagging. It was three hours past midnight in
Surveyor’s
official twenty-nine-hour day, and Severin was tired. He could call for a cup of coffee from the wardroom, he supposed, but that would mean waking up someone.

Perhaps Severin should put his puppet show aside and find something else to occupy his thoughts. Commanding the ship, for instance.

Surveyor
’s control room had the usual stations, for navigation, for controlling the engines, for communications, for the captain and the pilot and the sensor tech. Each station featured a couch balanced carefully in its acceleration cage, and each couch was equipped with a hinged control board that could lock down in front of the occupant.

At the moment the sensor station was occupied by a very bored Warrant Officer Second Class Chamcha, and the screen that occupied his desultory attention wasn’t tuned to the spectacular starscapes of Chee’s system, but to a game called Mindsprain, which he was losing through inattention. The sensor station had only been crewed because regulations required it, just as regulations required someone at the engine station, at the moment Lily Bhagwati, another at communications— Signaler Trainee Jaye Nkomo— and yet another, qualified to stand watches, in the captain’s couch— Severin himself.

The ship had completed the hour out of each watch dedicated to hard acceleration, and breakfast was still hours away. Severin’s attention drifted vaguely over the smiling pictures of Lord Go’s family that the captain had attached to the command board— the captain was lenient that way, and each station in the control room was decorated with personal items belonging to the various crew who served at that station. Pictures of family, notes from loved ones, paper flowers, jokes, poems, pictures of actors and singers and models, someone pretty to dream about when you were three months away from the nearest ring station.

Severin wished he could put a picture of Lady Liao on the board, as provocative a picture as possible. But then she was married to a prominent Peer and jurist, and Severin could hardly advertise their relationship that way.

Severin realized that he’d been staring for many minutes at Lord Go’s family, the smiling wife and waving children, proud parents, the pet dog and the stuffed Torminel doll. He raised his head, shook it violently to clear his mind, and scanned the other stations. Nothing seemed to warrant his attention. No alarms sounded, no violent colors flashed on the displays.

He called up Warrant Officer Chamcha’s game onto his own display, saw the comprehensive rate at which Chamcha was losing, and sighed. Perhaps when Chamcha conceded, Severin would challenge Chamcha to a game of hyper-tourney, or something. Anything to keep awake.

While waiting for Chamcha’s position to collapse he called up the navigation screen.
Surveyor,
heading straight from Wormhole One to Wormhole Two, was well outside of the normal trade routes that ended at Chee.

No navigational hazards threatened.

Severin looked at Chamcha. Hadn’t he lost
yet?

Something flashed on the sensor screens, and Severin looked down at his display, just as the lights and the display itself went off, then on . . .

“Status check!” Severin shouted, as the lights dimmed again, then flashed bright.

Warrant Officer Lily Bhagwati gave a sudden galvanic leap on her acceleration couch. There were shrill panicky highlights in her voice. “Power spike on Main Bus One! Spike on Main Bus Two!”

Severin’s fingers flashed to his display, tried to get the ship’s system display onto his board.

The lights went off, then returned. The image on Severin’s displays twisted, slowed.

How very interesting,
he thought distinctly.

“Breaker trip on Main Bus One!” Bhagwati said. “Main engine trip! Emergency power!”

Whatever was happening to the ship was happening too fast for Bhagwati’s reports to keep up. Automatic circuits were responding to protect themselves faster than the Terran crew could possibly act. Severin did catch the words “main engine trip” and had time to register their impact before the all-pervading rumble of the engine ceased, and he began to drift free of his couch.

He reached for his webbing to lash himself in and every light and every display in the room went dark, leaving him in pitch blackness save for the afterimage of his displays slowly fading from his retinas.

“Emergency Circuit One breaker trip!” Bhagwati shouted unnecessarily.

In the ensuing silence Severin heard the distant whisper of the ventilation slowly fade, like the last sigh of a dying man.

This never happens,
he told himself.

And because it never happened, there were no standard procedures to follow. An absolutely cold startup of all ship systems, including the ones that had been mysteriously damaged?

This
also
never happens,
he thought.

“Everyone stay in your cages!” he said. “I don’t want you drifting around in the dark.”

He tapped Lady Liao’s ring on the arm of his couch while he tried to think what to do next. Little flickers of light, like fireflies, indicated here and there where battery-powered flashlights waited in their chargers. These weren’t intended for emergencies, because the emergency lighting wasn’t supposed to fail— rather the lights were intended getting illumination into odd corners of the displays that were undergoing repair.

The flickering lights were inviting. Severin thought he should probably get a flashlight.

“I’m going to get a light,” he said. “Everyone else stand by.”

His fingers released the webbing that he’d never quite fastened down, then he unlocked his display and pushed it above his head, out of the way, a maneuver that also pushed him more deeply into his couch. Now free, he reached out, found one of the struts of his cage, and tugged gently till his head and torso floated free of the cage.

With careful movements, he jackknifed to pull his legs out of the cage, a movement that rolled the cage slightly. He straightened his body and his feet contacted the floor.

He couldn’t push off the floor to approach the flashlights: that would send him the wrong way. Instead he flung the acceleration cage with both hands, a movement that sent the cage spinning on all three axes while he drifted gently to the nearest wall. Severin reached out a hand and snagged the handle on the battery charger.

He became aware that was breathing hard. Even this little exertion had taxed him.

There was a distant thump. Then another. Severin realized that someone outside the control room was pounding on the heavy shielded door, slowly and with great deliberation.

He released the flashlight from the charger that was designed to hold it at high gee. He turned it on and flashed it over the control room.

Three sets of eyes stared back at him. The others were awaiting his orders.

From outside the command room door, Severin began to hear the muffled sound of screams.

*

Screams could still be heard faintly through the door.

Severin shone his light on Chamcha long enough for the sensor operator to work his way out of his cage and push across the room toward another flashlight. Then he turned to the problem of the door. He pulled and locked down a hand grip installed for the purpose, then— floating on the end of the handgrip— opened an access panel, removed a light alloy crank, and inserted it into the door mechanism. With one hand on the grip, the flashlight stuck to the wall on an adhesive strip, and a foot braced against the bottom of an instrument panel, Severin began to crank the door open.

The screams had stopped. Severin didn’t know whether to be encouraged by that or not.

By the time Severin had cranked open the heavy door he was puffing and throwing off beads of sweat that floated like drops of molten gold in the light. The control room crew clustered around him, hanging by fingertips onto cage struts or instrument displays, and their lights were turned to the outside corridor. Severin heard a series of gasps, and the single cry, “
Lord captain
!”

Severin looked out and saw Lord Go hanging weightless in the flashlight beams. He was wearing turquoise satin pajamas. His skin had turned bright red, and his eyes were hidden amid scarlet swellings. Large blisters were forming on his face and hands. His expression was slack.

Burns,
Severin thought. His mind whirled with the idea of a fire so fierce and sudden that it could knock out the ship and burn the captain before a single call for help could be made. But he saw no fire and could smell no burning.

“My lord!” Severin called. With one hand still on the grip, he swung himself toward Lord Go, reached out, and took his captain’s hand. Another crew member, he saw, was hovering motionlessly a short distance down the corridor, and from the golden hair that floated in the absence of gravity he knew it was Lady Maxine Wellstone, the ship’s junior lieutenant.

Severin drew Lord Go toward him by the hand, and his stomach queased at the slippery way the captain’s flesh felt under his fingers— it felt
unattached,
as if he could peel the skin from Lord Go’s hand like taking off a glove. He tried to brake Lord Go as gently as he could and brought him to a motionless halt just inside the door.

“Bhagwati,” he said. “Tether the lord captain to an acceleration cage or something. Try not to touch him.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Nkomo, go find the doctor and bring her here.”

Surveyor’s
doctor was no doctor at all, but a Pharmacist First Class. She would have to do.

“Very good, my lord,” Nkomo said. He made an agile dive into the corridor over Severin’s head, and Severin pushed off to Nkomo’s acceleration cage, where Lily Bhagwati was tethering Lord Go to a cage strut with her belt. Severin held himself a short distance from his captain’s face, and tried not to look too closely at the scalded, weeping flesh.

“My lord,” he said, “do you know what happened?”

Bloody eyes moved beneath the swollen lids. Lord Go sounded as if he were trying to talk past a tongue twice its normal size.

“Don’t . . . know,” he said.

“Was there a fire?”

“No . . . fire.” Lord Go gave a long sigh. “Hurts,” he said.

Severin bit his lip. “You’re in pain, my lord?”

“Hurts,” the captain said again.

“The doctor’s on his way.”

“Don’t know,” Lord Go said again, and then fell silent, lids falling on his dull eyes. His breathing was harsh. Severin looked at Bhagwati and saw his own anxiety mirrored in her wide brown eyes.

He had to get the ship working again.

“Right,” he said. “Bhagwati, Chamcha, check the main breakers. We’ve got to get power on.” He remembered the flash of blonde hair in the corridor outside. “I’m going to check on Lieutenant Wellstone.”

He pushed off the floor with his fingers and drifted into the corridor outside. He tried not to look at Wellstone’s burned, tortured face as he touched her neck in search of a pulse.