The Canopus Conundrum, page 13
As the three of them moved away, Kovis heard Fulke say, “How much did he hear?”
Not as much as perhaps he should have, the colonel thought. What was that all about? The resort director was angry ... because the fleet wasn’t moving? Well, so were many other people, but why would she blame Captain Windwist for it? What was it somebody might check?
Kovis contemplated finding the captain and asking him outright if there was anything he could do to assist – or indeed if there was anything he ought to know about. In the end, he decided to finish his task and worry about it later. If he encountered the captain in the meantime, he’d ask. Otherwise, he was sure it could wait. After all, the resort director always seemed to be angry about something. Whatever the problem was probably wasn’t anything like as urgent as she obviously believed it to be. He shrugged and went back through the hatch.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Your quartermaster wants to steal my minerals and ores.” Captain Mertens paced the floor, waving his arms, the tails of his embroidered coat slapping against his legs. “All my goods that I’ve worked so hard for. She wants to make me poor, take away all my credits, and leave me destitute!” It was a performance, Glory thought, from her post just inside the door. She exchanged an amused glance with the other prefect on duty, Konnil, a tall thin young man. In a brief exchange when they’d first met, she’d learned that he’d been a rookie prefect on Meridiana and had, like her, been recruited by Rydon since leaving the planet.
“Storekeeper,” Captain Asterion corrected politely.
“Your pardon?” Mertens stopped pacing and stared.
“Kora is a storekeeper, not a quartermaster.”
“Whatever she calls herself, she’s trying to steal my cargo!”
“It’s not theft,” Nashira said, folding her hands carefully on the edge of the table. “As I have explained to you several times, Captain Mertens, like all the other merchants you will be issued with a receipt for any and all goods taken from your cargo holds. A receipt you will be able to exchange for either credits or an equivalent cargo when we reach Union space. And please sit down.”
“And when’s that going to be?” demanded GFI Director Greybridge as Mertens grumpily returned to his seat. “It was going to take some ten years at pluslight, and here we are ambling along at sublight! Surely the chief scientist isn’t still waiting on a bunch of wall paintings to tell us which way to go!”
“Yes, tell me, Ashwood,” Nashira began, and then frowned suspiciously at her brother, who was seated next to Captain Asterion at the other end of the oval oversight committee group table. “Ashwood, do you have a black eye?”
“I do,” the chief scientist admitted, lowering the hand with which he’d been attempting to cover the offending blemish.
“How did you manage to get a black eye?”
“It was Thom’s fault,” Ashwood said. Off Nashira’s look, he continued hurriedly, “Of course it wasn’t Thom who hit me! We were walking along talking and turned a corner, and someone swung at Thom.”
“So how did you end up with the black eye?”
“He ducked,” Ashwood said mournfully. “I didn’t.”
Nashira shook her head disbelievingly. “Only you,” she said, glancing to her right, where normally Colonel Kovis would be seated. Instead, today, a young woman wearing a maroon command staff safesuit was seated there, nervously jotting notes on a holopad. Glory caught the young woman’s eye and offered her a sympathetic smile. “And just why did this man swing at Thom?” the admiral pursued.
“It was a woman, and she didn’t,” Ashwood said. “We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Nashira gave him a long look, then sighed. “Murals,” she said. “What’s taking so long?”
“There are more than we thought there would be,” Ashwood said. “And Kovis doesn’t have an assistant at the moment, thanks to the failure of the gravity plate which resulted in Prefect Glory breaking her leg. Frankly, I suspect they were fortunate to escape with their lives. However I’ve seen the holo model he’s building,” he hurried on, glancing across towards Glory and Konnil, “and the spread of the murals is very interesting. He tells me that many of them depict areas close to Sol which were visited early on before the substream system was expanded beyond its initial route. And he has confirmed that many of them show considerably more detail than the star maps held by the ships in the fleet. It’s really astonishing. I can’t imagine why anybody would paint star maps on their bulkheads!”
“But do they tell us which way to go?” Celebrant Sharra asked softly. The woman looked tired, Glory thought. “There’s no point in going to pluslight if we don’t know if we’re going in the right direction. The auguries are confusing.”
Glory mouthed ‘auguries?’ at Konnil, who shrugged.
“Perhaps we should take a vote on it,” Nashira said, and glanced down the table. “But we’re still missing Resort Director Parker. Can you call her again, er ...?” The admiral hesitated, and Glory concluded that she couldn’t remember the name of the young woman assisting her. “Please?” she finished eventually.
The young woman tapped her wristcom and began talking quietly to the holo that popped up, whilst Nashira looked around. “Whilst we’re waiting – Rydon, you advised me you had something you wanted to raise?”
“Yes, Admiral.” The lord chief justice straightened from the slight slouch he’d sunk into. The man always looked as if he’d had a hard night, Glory thought, then remembered what she had spent the previous night doing, and felt her face heat. Konnil gave her an odd look and she found herself examining her nails to avoid meeting his, or anybody else’s, gaze.
“It’s about the unrest in the fleet,” Rydon said. “It’s getting worse, Admiral. Much worse. Doctor Medwen and Surgeon General Nazif both report increasing numbers of minor injuries from brawling.”
“Why are people fighting?” Neno Rockspire, the ex-commander of the Wheel at Meridiana, asked. He sounded puzzled, Glory thought.
“Mostly because they’re overcrowded, bored and, to be quite honest, terrified,” Rydon said flatly. “The closure of the substream has left them split apart from family members, from their homes, and from the life they know. They don’t know how long it’s going to take to get back, they don’t know if loved ones have given them up for dead, or whether they’ll have any kind of jobs to go back to, and some of them probably think we won’t make it. If any of them realise the real reason we’ve dropped out of pluslight, we’ll probably have riots or see some of them trying to go it alone. I’ve managed to sign up some new prefects,” he continued. “Even if some of them are somewhat accident-prone.” He gave Glory a stern stare, and she swallowed. He had a point. “But I haven’t managed to recruit nearly enough people to deal with all the unrest,” he concluded. “And neither should I need to,” he added. “Like me, Nashira, I’m sure you don’t want to run a totalitarian regime.”
Nashira’s temporary assistant cleared her throat nervously. “Uh, Admiral? Comms have spoken with the Canopus crew, and they have no idea where Resort Director Parker is.”
“Can’t they comm her?” Nashira asked.
“There is no net on the Canopus,” Ashwood said, drawing his sister’s attention away from the petrified-looking assistant. “I mentioned it before, Nashira. It’s the reason Kovis was unable to call for assistance when he was trapped.”
“Well, if there’s no other business ...” Nashira started.
The assistant cleared her throat.
“Yes?” Nashira snapped.
“You asked me to remind you about the petition from Kerran Morlak,” the assistant murmured, pushing a piece of paper towards the admiral.
“Oh, that’s right.” Nashira glanced at the paper and raising an eyebrow. “I’m not sure we can deal with this in the absence of Resort Director Parker.”
“What is it about?” Rydon wanted to know.
“This man has mislaid his sister. According to him, she travelled to the resort at Meridiana some days before the evacuation took place, but he says he’s been unable to locate her and is concerned that she might have been left behind. Of course the fleet census is still incomplete ...”
“What’s the delay on that?” Captain Mertens wanted to know. “I gave you my family’s manifest days ago!”
“Some other ships have been less willing to provide the information requested.” Glory noticed that Nashira’s voice was somehow sweeter and wondered whether that indicated that she was annoyed.
“How odd,” Mertens said. “Why would anybody not want to tell you how many warm bodies they have crammed into their much too small ships?”
“He has a point,” Konnil murmured to Glory.
“He does,” she agreed, and then braced herself for an admonishing comment – which, in the absence of Kovis, didn’t happen. She frowned at the young woman occupying what had previously been the colonel’s chair. Apparently Nashira’s temporary assistant wasn’t as security conscious as Kovis. She’d previously thought the colonel to be paranoid, but now wondered, knowing his history, whether he was just cautious.
“The good news,” Ashwood said, “for the record, is that all the ships in the fleet have been visited by our engineering team, and repairs have been undertaken where they were needed. Some extra pods are being fabricated to allow our evacuees more space, which should alleviate the overcrowding and reduce tensions.”
“It can’t happen soon enough,” Rydon noted.
“Also,” Ashwood continued, “the ‘refreshment break’.” He raised an eyebrow at Nashira, since that was what she’d chosen to tell the fleet they were doing, “It has resulted in a significant increase in our stocks of minerals and ores. Mina assures me that the fabricators are working flat out, which should also assist in riot prevention.”
“I certainly hope so,” the lord chief justice murmured.
The oversight committee meeting concluded with no sign of Parker, and without a decision on whether to start the fleet moving again. Ashwood petitioned for a day more, and Nashira begrudgingly allowed that, since they had already wasted so much time, another twenty-four hours wouldn’t make much difference.
It was only mid-afternoon, so Glory made her way back to her tiny cabin. She pulled out her stool and sat down, looking around herself. Medwen was right, she realised. Her life was empty. There were almost no personal items in the room. She had left her home planet with little more than the clothes she stood up in, too devastated by the betrayals she had experienced to want to keep anything to remind her of home. She’d abandoned her clothes, her entertainment cubes and the crystals and oils that had once seemed so important to her, and during her time on Meridiana hadn’t accumulated anything that held meaning for her. She’d evacuated the planet with only a small backpack of essential items. She had a pretty bottle that had once contained fresher gel on a display shelf, and that was all.
She thought about Kovis’s quarters, which had been spartan, but still contained personal items. She owned the safesuit she was wearing and two civilian robes, and apart from some smalls, that was her entire wardrobe. She spent a moment idly contemplating acquiring something outrageous to wear for the next time she saw Kovis – there were a couple of outlets she’d noticed on the ship’s mall that carried civilian clothing – but decided she wasn’t prepared to gamble on their liaison lasting more than a few steamy nights.
She remembered she’d meant to ask Rydon about the suicidal woman from the Canopus, and after arguing with herself for a moment, called him. He answered from his office.
“Yes, Prefect?” She could read nothing from his expression, and wondered if her own was equally impassive.
“I wondered,” she said, “if you could tell me what happened to the woman I sent over on the shuttle from the Canopus.”
“The one who tried to defenestrate herself out of the airlock?” Rydon said. “Interesting, isn’t it,” he added, “that the planetary term for throwing yourself or someone else out of a window has become acceptable usage on a star cruiser? Yes, Prefect, that was a good piece of work. Well done. Maura is doing well. It turns out she’s a hairdresser. Did you know we have a shortage of hairdressers in the fleet? It appears that many of us like to keep our hair manageable.” He lifted an eyebrow at her, and she felt herself blush, assuming that was a reference to her own dyed hair.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m pleased.”
“Was that all, Prefect?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well. I assume Medwen has not yet released you for full duty.”
“Not yet,” Glory said. She hoped to persuade the doctor to do that in the very near future.
“Thank you for covering the committee meeting,” he said, and ended the call.
She considered her two robes. She’d returned the sick bay robe that morning. She’d rather have liked to hang on to it, it being the one Kovis had taken her out of (twice!) but that would have been selfish when sick bay probably needed it. Her own robes were gaudy, suited to the casino on Meridiana, but she thought them too garish for socialising on the Atria. She was going to have to socialise in her prefect safesuit, she concluded glumly.
Medwen had asked Glory to collect her from sick bay, and was waiting with two other women when the prefect arrived. One was quite short and wore boots with very thick soles, presumably to try and make herself taller; Medwen introduced her as Raffi Forrester. The other was tall, slender and had long dark hair. “And I’m Charra,” she said cheerfully. “Pleased to meet you, Glory. I love the colour of your hair.”
“Thank you,” Glory said, unsure who these two women were. She was embarrassed to note that all three were wearing pastel drapes over their neutral-coloured safesuits. She wished she’d thought to pick something up to make herself look less official, but none of them said anything about her outfit.
“Cristal’s meeting us at the Jupe,” Charra added to Medwen, who nodded.
“Let’s go,” the doctor said.
Glory followed her new acquaintances back out to the central core of the star cruiser, where they boarded a magrav pod headed towards the stern of the ship. She tried not to cling to the side of her seat as the pod slid along its rail high above the slower walkways. Although she’d travelled in them a few times before, she still hadn’t got used to the height and the speed at which they moved. The central core of the Atria was still brightly lit, and she could see people moving around below them, sitting outside the eateries or going in and out of the shops. She had to take a day to look around the outlets properly, she thought. Had it occurred to her, she could have done so that afternoon instead of sitting in her cabin reading.
They alighted at the final stop on the rail. There were a number of coloured signs indicating what lay in each direction, and the group followed a green arrow labelled ‘Jupiter Lounge’.
The passageway had brightly painted walls. They passed several unmarked doorways before arriving at an open archway beyond which was light and laughter. Stepping through, Glory came to an astonished halt. The far side of the bar appeared to be open to space, and against the backdrop of infinity the fleet was spread out in a synchronised dance.
“Are those viewscreens?” she heard herself exclaim.
“Would you believe they’re not?” Medwen said. “Amazing, isn’t it? Those are actually transparent bulkheads. What you’re looking at is the fleet – not a hologram, but the real thing. This is the Jupiter Lounge,” the doctor continued, putting her arm through Glory’s and leading her to an empty table adjacent to one of the windows. “It’s officers and guests only, but tonight you’re our guest.”
“Are you all officers?” Glory blurted, still gazing in astonishment at the vista. She hadn’t before taken in the variety of ships the fleet contained. All manner of vessels hung in the darkness of space, running lights ablaze, shuttles and firebirds darting between them. Most were long and cylindrical, the ideal shape to traverse the substream, but a few were blockier and she guessed them to be Wheel–to–planet shuttles from Meridiana.
“Of course, or we couldn’t get in here,” Raffi laughed. “Not that that would stop us trying! Beta Patrol’s getting sloppy,” she went on, squinting at the view and scratching her head. “That pilot there – see?” She indicated one of the firebirds. “He got far too close to the comms array on that merchant yacht. I bet Zaran has something to say to him when he reviews the recordings.”
“He’s probably saying it right now,” said another girl, sliding awkwardly into the seat beside Medwen and smiling at Glory. “Hello, I’m Cristal.”
“Cristal is Zaran’s match,” Medwen explained helpfully. “Is he still on duty, then?”
“I made him promise not to work for more than another hour,” Cristal said. “He’s coming to get me when he’s done.”
Raffi called up the drinks menu and they all tapped in their orders. Glory opted for a soft drink, both because she had pretty much given up anything stronger since sobering up on Meridiana, and because she didn’t want to inadvertently let slip anything that would confirm Medwen’s suspicions about the way she and Kovis had spent the previous night.
“I’ll just have a fruit juice,” Cristal sighed.
“So I should think,” Medwen laughed. “Admiral Nashira’s future grandchild doesn’t want to come out of the womb drunk!”
The awkwardness was due to pregnancy, then, Glory thought. Of course, she realised, being an Elite ship the crew would have their families on board, unlike merchants, who normally left their children safely behind on their planet of origin. The children she’d seen around the ship she’d thought were refugees. Now she realised she’d been operating under an incorrect assumption.
The prefect had been concerned that she would be bombarded with curious questions about her background, but other than asking her the name of her hair colour, they asked no personal questions at all. She wondered what Medwen had told them about her. Although the doctor had said she hadn’t got many friends, it seemed this group knew one another well. From their chatter, she identified that Cristal was something to do with traffic control, Raffi was a pilot and Charra was the helmsman on Alpha Watch. There was an easy rapport between the group, and the conversation ranged widely over a variety of subjects. Nobody seemed bothered by the fact Glory spent more time listening than talking, and she was surprised to realise she didn’t feel uncomfortable, as she might have expected to with strangers.
