Free Death of a Starship by Jay Lake

nothing better than a human
eyeball would certainly notice a boat dropping out of the sky in
the middle of a developed area.
    It was not a subtle thing to
do.
    Using the codelock key, Albrecht
lit up the crew workstations. The boat had power. It had actual,
live system power. A feed from the city mains, probably. It’s how
he would have done it. A commercial-industrial area like the Sixth
Wharf had all kinds of big customers with weird consumption
profiles – a standard two-kilovolt industrial feed would keep a
boat this small live and warm on long-term hold.
    A few minutes fiddling with
the control panels made things clear enough. This boat was Jenny’s Little Pearl, a Xiao-Gang Ye -class cutter – very similar to the Shostakovich series. The boat
definitely thought it had touched down about eleven years ago,
though Albrecht wasn’t the least bit prepared to trust the
log. Pearl ’s
systems were at 61% of optimal, which was pretty damned good for
something which had been sitting underground for years. No killing
failures, though redundancies left a lot to be desired. And it had
almost fourteen hundred hours of fuel load, bloc hydrogen stored in
ion-lattice sponges. Enough to go skiving around Halfsummer’s inner
system, if the boat could get into the air and out of the gravity
well in the first place.
    So now he could turn it off and go
back to his five credit mattress. Or he could stay on board and eat
freeze-dried chow and wait for someone to come find him. Or he
could try to figure how the boat was supposed to get back out from
under here. As the fat man had said, make it go away.
    As if there was any question
what he would do next. This wasn’t as good as being back on a
c-transit run, but it was hell of a lot closer to space than he’d
come since being busted off Princess
Janivera .
    Time to start tracing
circuits , Albrecht thought. The bad guys
would find him if they wanted him. They probably already knew where
he was.
    Before he got to work, Albrecht
dismounted the hotwired hatch controls and locked himself
in.
    ‡
    Four hours later he had eaten
a very bad bag of something which was allegedly chicken fried rice,
and established several key facts about Jenny’s Little Pearl . The boat was
indeed on the city power mains. He couldn’t see the billing
interface from inside the power shunt, but Albrecht would bet his
left foot the power authority didn’t know where that particular
five kilovolt line was terminated. The same umbilical which brought
in power brought in a ten millimeter water line, which kept
environmental systems sufficiently hydrated without needing to draw
down ship power in order to crack water out of the air. It also
brought in a local nöosphere link, which meant Pearl had a comm number and data
access.
    Somebody had wanted to be able to
send out for pizza.
    And they had, at that. Pearl had
four cabins, two port and two starboard. The portside cabins,
closest to the hatch, had obviously seen use as cells. There were
literally chains welded to the bulkheads. Albrecht wasn’t too keen
on examining the stains on the decks in there. The starboard cabins
had a more lived-in look. This boat had been a prison and a
hideaway both. Not a bad method of keeping out of sight for
extended periods. Store a few ships of food upstairs, skim some off
for provisions down below, with the unmonitored utility feeds, no
one would ever know.
    Damn lousy waste of a good ship’s
boat, but at the same time, Albrecht had to appreciate the
ingenuity involved.
    It wasn’t the only ingenuity on
board, either. He also found a soft control stack loaded in the
engineering panel which was highly customized and utterly
uncommented. Albrecht traced the circuit routings and eventually
located a second outside connection down in the engineering section
– a hand-built job which didn’t strike him as very trustworthy, but
there it was.
    In effect, the unmarked
control stack was a big red button labeled, “Push Me.”