Here Be Dragons (2 page)

But not today. Elena grabbed a handhold and pulled herself forward along the compartment. The ceiling that surrounded the door she had dropped through was curved outwards like the inside of a half pipe, and heavily threaded with pipes and cables that provided plenty of grip. A ladder ran along its hollow, but it was a point of pride among the crew to use this as little as possible. The deck below bowed upwards to meet her, a concave bubble that mirrored the bend of the ceiling. The inner compartments at
Gabriel’s
core were cylindrical, and ran from bow to stern like a spinal cord. Elena felt as if she were hanging from the roof of one dome and above another.

Each compartment was sealed off from its four neighbors—fore, aft, clockwise and counterclockwise—by a thick metal bulkhead with a hatchway cut through its center. Elena, small as she was, dove straight for the middle of the hatch and sailed through without scraping the edges. She grabbed a handle on the other side and halted her momentum cleanly. Laid into the bulkhead on either side of the hatch were monitors which displayed the current air temperature, composition, pressure, and motion. If a leak were detected in this compartment the monitor would flash red, the hatchways would slam shut, and the danger would be trapped—along with anyone happened to be left inside. By hovering next to a hatchway and angling her vision just right, Elena could see nearly a dozen such green lights falling away into the distance, all the way down the ship to fore and aft.

Elena slipped through another hatch and passed an interlock at the center of the inner hull, an empty vertebra that allowed her to cross directly from one side of the ship to the other. Inside this interlock was the door to her stateroom, and Elena was tempted briefly by the prospect of a cup of coffee inside. But the staff were waiting for her, at the next interlock. She came to rest at the forward bulkhead, palms flat on the door like a handstand, and hit the intercom.

“Captain Gonzalez, requesting permission.”

The voice that answered in English—every officer was required to speak at least one of the Global Union’s working languages, and just the one if it happened to be English—was much deeper than her own, and very English indeed.

“Granted.”

The door opened, and she dropped inside the barrel. Elena could dimly see the front door directly beneath her as the rear entrance slid shut behind her feet. On the bridge there was none of the soft lighting that filled the deck, and she had to squint to make out the faces in the gloom.
Gabriel’s
nerve center was lit only by the glow of the touchscreens, and the luminous crater that had once been Telescope 35, which filled the center of the room.

The bridge stations were arranged in a circle around the edge of the cylinder. The four duty officers were strapped tightly into place, each equipped with three touchscreens, two control sticks, and an acceleration chair, which was a piece of technology about as sophisticated as a water bed. They sat facing the center of the bridge, and Telescope 35. The image was the recording made by her visor, magnified and enhanced by the holographic projectors which ringed the room.

The man on duty at the flight commander’s station had a neat black mustache and soft brown eyes, and his skin and hair were exactly the same shade as hers, though they’d been born half a world apart. As Elena approached he unstrapped himself and came to attention.

“Chief Officer, I relieve you,” she said.

Vijay Nishtha saluted.

“Captain, I stand relieved. Officer Lamentov, please return to Forward Control.”

Vijay spoke with the Received Pronunciation of an English public school, though he’d never set foot on the British Isles in all his life. Elena would have guessed that he’d grown up in London or Cairo, instead of a refugee camp. The replacement officer at Elena’s station shut down her control panel, and then rose to drift silently out of the bridge. Vijay remained in his seat—it was standard procedure for the second-in-command to act as officer of the watch when the captain was on the bridge. When she was gone, Vijay spoke again.

“No coffee?”

Elena slid into her chair, and stared directly at the center screen. The microphones inside her desk had already read her voiceprint, and now the cameras scanned her face and retinas, and triple confirmed her identity. The flight station activated and loaded her control panel template. Each of her three touchscreens lit up with graphics and text, arranged in her preferred layout—communications on the left, navigation on the right, and watch in the middle, with its endless sensor displays.

“Business before pleasure. Okay, for the log. Let’s get this over with.”

She cleared her throat once, a tic that had never left her, even though she knew that all Control would see or hear would be the transcription of her voice.

“1135 hours, 2 April 2153, GSA-1138,
Gabriel,
Captain Gonzalez commanding and speaking. At approximately 1045 hours today, Telescope 35 ceased transmitting telemetry. Prior performance had been nominal. Remote diagnostics were unresponsive, and pursuant to regulation Captain Gonzalez performed an extravehicular excursion from 1100 to 1130 in order to personally observe and, if practicable, manually repair Telescope 35. Upon visual inspection, the telescope had suffered catastrophic damage and was irreparable. Presumed cause of loss is a high-velocity micrometeoroid impact. Outsider activity is not suspected at this time.”

Elena had been speaking for only thirty seconds, and already felt the urge to cough.

“Telescope 35 performed wide-band, long-exposure spectral analysis for ninety degrees of sky off the starboard beam. The Officer of the Watch has already adjusted the reconnaissance schedule to accommodate its absence. Estimated coverage loss is one percent, and not considered mission-critical. Will proceed, pending confirmation from Mission Control. This concludes this incident report. Captain Gonzales out.”

Elena put a hand to her mouth, took a breath, and waited a beat. Then she coughed.

“Technomierda.”

The crew smiled quietly. None of them were native Spanish speakers, but they all knew what that meant.

“Captain?”

“Yes, Vijay?”

“You said ‘this’ twice in one sentence.”

“If they would let me transmit reports en espanol then this shit wouldn’t happen. Hassoun, get all that?”

“The part about the shit, Cap’n?”

Second Officer Hassoun Masri manned the communications desk, directly across from Vijay, who sat at her right hand. Hassoun’s boyish face fit his quick smile and thirty years.

“Before that.”

“Yes Cap’n, log is ready to transmit at the next window.”

Strict radio discipline was observed on the outside. All messages to Mission Control were sent by microburst, and at this distance they had to be aimed with meticulous care lest, they miss the recipient by a few hundred kilometers. Communications would only grow more difficult as
Gabriel
drew closer to Jupiter—the titanic lightning storms in the atmosphere blanketed the entire region with electromagnetic interference.

Elena’s eyes swept the computer screens, as they did every five seconds or so.

“Anything interesting happen while I was out?”

“There was a brief discussion of when it is appropriate for the commanding officer to perform a routine spacewalk,” Vijay said.

“And the consensus?” It was too dim inside the bridge for the black deposits on her suit to be visible.

“We have decided that your blatant disregard for standard operating procedure forces us to relieve you of command of this vessel.”

“You’ll die trying. Demyan, did you have any part of this mutiny?”

Her navigator, Second Officer Demyan Yukovych, answered from the helm station.

“I fought, ma’am, but I was outnumbered.”

He spoke without taking his blue eyes off his screens.
Gabriel
was now traveling at over thirty kilometers per second, or about one hundred times the speed of sound in air, yet the massive rocket engines at the stern were ice cold. They’d done their hot, noisy work months ago and then gone into hibernation. With no actual propulsion to busy them, Elena’s navigators spent their shift monitoring
Gabriel’s
flight path and making minute adjustments with the dozen tiny thrusters that spotted the hull.

“You’ll be spared. How’s the avram?”

“Nominal.”

“ETA?”

“Eighteen hundred.”

Gabriel
would cross the border in a little more than six hours. If she crossed at all.

“Weapons check, Vijay.”

“Marco’s people have just finished, Captain. They visually inspected every gun, every missile, and every drum of ammunition on the ship.”

“Bueno. That’s good practice for when they do it again two hours from now.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“From the moment I give the word, how long to fire up the ballista?”

“Yesterday’s simulation was five minutes, six seconds,” Vijay said.

“Hassoun, tell Officer Okoye I want that down to five minutes flat.”

Hassoun clicked away at his keysticks with both thumbs. The desk beneath the screens could arrange itself into an old-fashioned keyboard in any layout he liked, but typing with the keysticks—squeezing the triggers and rotating the thumb pads—was much faster.

“Are we expecting word from Control?”

“Good timing,” Hassoun said. “Incoming now. Lots of junk in here.”

Elena waited briefly. Transmissions from the Space Agency’s outposts in the Asteroid Belt were encoded, enciphered, and encrypted, and packed with gibberish to disguise their contents as white noise. It always took the computers several minutes to unlock and unravel the message.

“Bullet points?”

“A solar flare hit Earth.” The moment froze and hung there. “Minor, looks like. Well, relatively. No outages, nothing to worry about.“

Elena breathed out.

“When should we expect it?”

Hassoun tapped his screen, and a map of the solar system appeared on the holo. In false color, the surge of radiation that had struck the Earth hours before looked like a tidal wave crashing against a mountain.

“Ten days, more or less.”

“What were you saying about good timing?” Elena ran her fingers through her hair. “Bueno. It’s fine. Que otra cosa?”

“Control is pleased to report that
Michael
was fully pressurized yesterday, and she’s taken on crew.”

A round of applause swept the bridge. The first of
Gabriel’s
sister ships was due to be commissioned in a few months, with
Raphael
following another few months after that. It would be just the three of them—
Archangel
, the pathfinder, had been lost with all hands on her maiden voyage to the outside, thirty months earlier. Elena knew that there were technically four more units of the class on order, but the new government at Cairo had put the contract on hold, unwilling to commit to the troubled Archangel Project any further. Yet another scandal was the last thing anyone needed.

“I do not suppose anyone remembered to bring cigars,” Vijay said. Elena smiled and waved at Hassoun to continue.

“We’ve got the latest political report. Looks like that Cantonese thing is going to get worse before it gets any better,” he said.

“Security’s problem, not ours,” Elena said.

That was technically correct, and substantially untrue. The Space Agency didn’t operate on Earth, not even during the Nuclear Crisis five years earlier. But if not for the Cantonese civil war, or the border clashes with Brazil and Nigeria, or the riots in Britain,
Gabriel
would already be home right now, instead of deep outside.

“Another battle over Australia.”

“Who won this time?”

“We say we did. The independents say they did.”

“And when the report is declassified in fifty years, we’ll find out who’s lying. Is there anything in there we actually need to know?”

“Looks like that’s it.”

Even though she knew she had no reason to expect more, Elena bit her lip. Personal messages for the crew were common on most ships, but not on
Gabriel.
All non-official communications were forbidden while on the outside.

“Wait…Uh, no. A video.”

“Video?” Elena turned to Hassoun. “Sure about that?”

“Yes, Cap’n.” The gloom of the bridge hid Hassoun’s reddened face. “Sorry, I thought it was more garbage. Control never sends video.”

“Captain’s eyes only?”

“It’s unrestricted,” Hassoun said.

“On the holo.”

Telescope 35 shimmered and twisted in midair, and then blinked out of existence.

Poised at the center of the bridge was an elegant man, dressed warmly and topped by a bare head of silver hair, standing alone in a field of snow. Anonymous gray towers rose to the white sky behind his head, but everyone on the bridge recognized the scene immediately. This was the most photographed place on Earth, though Avramovich Square looked nothing like it had during its namesake’s time, over a century before. The laboratory at its edge, where Moishe Avramovich had built the device which had made him first the world’s most famous man, and then its wealthiest, was long gone, crushed by the glacier that had once buried St. Petersburg.

And Elena certainly didn’t need to be told who this man was. A light snow began to fell as Jacob Erasmus, the Prime Minister of the Global Union, began to speak.

“Two generations ago, delegates from sixty two nations gathered here, the birthplace of human space colonization, and vowed that the great project which we had begun would not die in its infancy. It was here in St. Petersburg that Moishe Avramovich had first dreamed of a new home for humanity among the heavens, free of tyranny and empty of hatred. It was his inspiration that carried us into space, but it was his aspiration that drove us there. His vision of a better world has been our lantern, always there to guide us in the night. Even the Storm, and the dark days that followed, could not extinguish that light.”

He began to walk forward, slowly, one deliberate step at a time.

“The
Solstice,
and her journey into the unknown, was to be a new dawn for humanity. We would send an emissary to the king of planets, and take our rightful place in the solar system once more. But the hand we reached out to the heavens was cut down, by an invader who had claimed our birthright for his own. The sunrise was stolen from us, and the night sky which once held so much promise now brought only fear.”