Free Death of a Starship by Jay Lake Page A

Either you
were supposed to know what it did, or you weren’t supposed to push
it. Albrecht figured the control had to launch some process which
extracted Pearl out of the hole in the ground – somebody had gone to a lot of
trouble to keep her up and spaceworthy – but he was darned if he
could see how the boat was supposed to get out. Blow up the godown
and lift from the crater? Any explosion powerful enough to shatter
the poured concrete floor upstairs would seriously endanger the
boat.
    He decided to ask for an opinion.
Albrecht used the command panel to open up a generic nöosphere
access and asked for a connection to The Newt Trap, along Sixth
Wharf.
    “ Thank you for calling The Newt
Trap,” said the bar’s comm system, displaying a sort of titchy
fractal screen saver.
    “ I want to talk to–” Albrecht
stopped. What was the man’s name. “The fat man. You know the fat
man?”
    “ There is no one here by that
name.”
    Damned machines. Any human would
have known exactly who he meant. How many four hundred kilo
monsters could there be hanging around the Sixth Wharf? “Let me
speak to a live person, then. Anyone.”
    “ Please wait.” The comm switched
him over to a syrupy hold music which went on for about two minutes
before the screen flickered and the fat man came on.
    “ Oh...it’s you,” he said.
“Enjoying yourself?”
    “ More fun than a barrel of
junkies,” Albrecht replied. “I think I can make your problem go
away, but I need to understand something.”
    The fat man’s piggy eyes narrowed
to flickering slits. “What would that be?”
    “ Someone wired this thing to
leave. If it can find clear air, the right hands can make it go
away for good.” He flexed his fingers in front of the pickup.
“Mine, for example. But what happens when I press the go button? I
don’t see how it works.”
    “ You don’t–” The fat man cut
himself off, glanced at something out of the pickup range. When he
looked back again his eyes had narrowed, his face pale. “Go now,
boy. They’re coming.” The connection dropped.
    Albrecht sat and thought that one
over. Less than a minute later, the boat’s systems warbled. Someone
was trying the hatch.
    “ Guess you got my
address,” he told no one in particular. “Time to press the big red
button.” He initiated hot-start pre-flight sequencing from the
command panel. It would take about twenty minutes to get Pearl ready. Unless his
visitors had brought a thermic lance or some serious machine tools
with them, they weren’t getting in that fast. Not now that he’d
secured the hatch.
    The command panel bleeped. Incoming
comm link.
    He tried to imagine a downside to
answering. Whoever was out there knew he was in here. The fat man
wouldn’t be hard to sweat. Public Safety had already shaken
Albrecht down once, a month or so ago after the library incident.
If they had been following him around, they knew it was him, and
they knew he was down here.
    If it was the bad guys, whoever
they might be, well...same logic. No one was getting in without
some damned hard work, and he wasn’t coming out now. Albrecht felt
oddly cheerful. It was sort of like jumping off the cliff and
hoping like hell there was more water than rock under that mist
down there.
    He answered the call about
the time a dull banging began echoing through the hull.
“ Jenny’s Little Pearl , flight deck.”
    A hard, familiar face flickered
into being on the panel. Of course – it was the Public Safety watch
commander who’d briefly interrogated him those weeks
ago.
    “ Oh,” she said,
almost sadly. “It is you. I’ve just lost a hundred credit bet.”
    “ Hello, ma’am,”
said Albrecht with a sort of preternatural cheerfulness. If he
didn’t get Pearl into orbit quite soon, he was going down so hard and so far
he’d have to tunnel up to find a shallow grave. “I’d make it up to
you if I could.”
    She leaned into her pickup, eyes
large and bright on his panel. “What the hell