Alex was quiet.
“Hey, spesh, you asleep?”
He did not answer, and the driver fell silent. Seemed even a bit offended. He stopped the car at the spaceport a little too abruptly, as though wishing that Alex would smash his face into the windshield.
“Thanks,” said Alex, opening his eyes. He really had dozed off, but his body reacted quickly, readjusted to the inertia, and fixed itself firmly in the car seat, as soon as the car’s brakes engaged. “Good luck to you.”
He did not leave any more tip than had already been included in the fare.
The central civilian spaceport of Quicksilver Pit was not all that its name suggested. Sometime in the past, it had been the main loading dock for ships traveling into orbit. But about twenty years before, another civilian spaceport had been built, farther away from the capital and capable of receiving the larger, modern spaceships. The new spaceport did not receive the title of Central, though in reality that’s what it was.
Alex smoked, standing near the automatic glass doors. There were lots of people around, but this spaceport seemed more crowded because the buildings themselves were small. Periodically, as each shuttle arrived, a crowd would spill out through the doors. The people all looked alike, as if they were clones. Each shift on the orbital factories and shipyards lasted three days and three nights, but there were a lot—a whole lot—of factories orbiting Quicksilver Pit.
Throwing away his cigarette, Alex entered the building. He had suddenly realized that he was simply putting off his last steps toward the ship as long as possible.
Port authority clerks scurried around. Menial workers in uniforms and civilian passengers crowded around registration desks. Security officers strolled back and forth, every one of them a spesh—of deceptively small stature, with narrow shoulders.
Alex walked through the crowd toward one of the entrances leading to the service tiers of the spaceport. He noticed several security officers pause some distance away to keep an eye on him.
He said, looking at the camera panel, “Alexander Romanov, spesh, captain and master-pilot of the spaceship Mirror, the Sky Company, Earth-based.”
His identity chip, implanted under the skin just below his collarbone some twenty years before, pulsed almost imperceptibly. A full-blown identity check, complete with an express genotype analysis, was in progress.
Alex waited patiently while the molecular detectors in his capillary net caught a brand-new lymphocyte, just entering the bloodstream, then split it apart to compare it with the one they had on file. It was impossible to fool the identity chip in maximum vigilance mode. Even if you surgically removed it from the body and placed it in a vial of the owner’s freshly drawn blood, it would not give a false result. The identity check could take a few minutes, but security was more important than convenience.
“Identity established, access permitted,” replied the computer terminal. It was a human voice, so it must have been an actual operator, rather than a machine, which had performed the screening. The force field blocking the entrance changed its polarity, allowing him to pass. “Do you require assistance?”
“Is the floor plan standard here? The spider room in the usual place?”
“The usual place,” replied the operator. “Proceed.” The rank of captain would have allowed Alex to use the transit platforms. But it was not a long walk, so he preferred to go to the spider room on foot. It was a subtle pleasure that was hard to explain—to walk through the wide, half-empty tunnels stretching under the buildings of the port, to nod to the passers-by. There were no passengers here, no tradesmen, no pickpockets, none of the scum that accumulated in any transit artery like cholesterol in human veins. All who remained here were his people. Even if not all were speshes.
The spider room was the spaceport name for the accounting and contract departments. The name reflected both the appearance of such departments and their functionaries, and the eternal antagonism between the technical workers and the paper-pushing bureaucrats. The spiders often retaliated with a vengeance. At times, Alex felt that if it were up to them, no ship would ever leave port.
“Are you here on business?” inquired the guard at the entrance to the bureaucratic realm. The question was almost a ritual one, and Alex had heard it in dozens of spaceports.
“No, I’m just a masochist,” Alex retorted, as usual.
The guard smirked and touched a sensor, unblocking the entrance. He would probably have been happy to let a terrorist into the spider room, but for some reason no terrorist ever turned up to threaten the lives of accountants.
Alex walked in.
The spider room was utterly quiet. Many other departments preferred to have some background music. Not here. Well, maybe they did have music, but for each individual workstation.
Twenty spiders, or to be exact, she-spiders, turned their heads simultaneously and peered at Alex. Almost all of them used the simplest neuro-shunts, and delicate bundles of wires stretched down from their temples to the desktop computers. Only a few accountant-speshes went without these dubious ornaments. Neuro-terminals were built into the headrests of their chairs.
“Good morning,” said Alex.
He always felt slightly uncomfortable entering a spider room. It wasn’t fear or hostility … more like a nagging feeling of shame at bothering these people with his seemingly petty and useless business, while they were busy solving truly important problems.
The spiders were quiet, busy with their silent network dialog. Only one girl, the youngest and prettiest one, was moving her lips—she had not yet rid herself of this useless habit. Alex had no intention of taking advantage of her weakness, but her mouth moved so distinctly that he could not help reading her lips. “He’s hot … girls, let me … come on …”
Oh, no! All that would mean was that she’d take three times longer than necessary to process his documents.
One of the accountant-speshes gestured to him to come up. That was good. He could hope that this spesh-woman, in her virtual detachment, would not take too long.
“Name?” said the spider. Her eyes were closed, and she did not even bother to take a look at the pilot for politeness’s sake. The information from the computer receptors was enough for her. Well, at least she was nice enough to talk to him in person rather than using a computer speaker and a voice synthesizer. She had a pale, bluish face, thin lips, swollen eyelids covered with red traces of capillaries, and short, smoothly pulled-back hair.
“Alex Romanov, spesh, master-pilot …” he began, and the spider lifted her hand, indicating that he had provided enough information.
Alex stopped in mid-sentence. Stood there, looking at the spider’s desktop computer. The screen was turned off, so he had no way of knowing what the spider was doing at the moment. Perhaps she was preparing someone’s contract. Or looking for ways to evade taxes. Or sorting warehouse cargo. Or maybe she was making love to a partner on the other side of the galaxy. The little computer with a small sticker proudly proclaiming “Gel-Crystal inside” allowed her to do a whole lot. Even if the crystal was only the size of a match head …
“The spaceship Mirror of the Sky Company,” said the spider.
And opened her eyes.
This was so unexpected that Alex started.
It was as though a mighty sorcerer had whispered a magic word, turning the computer’s living appendage human again.
The spider turned out to be rather young. Even pretty. If only she would change the hair, visit a cosmetologist, and replace her work overalls with a dress …
“Your papers,” she said.
Alex did not understand her. He reached into his pocket for his copy of the contract. But the she-spider was already handing him the freshly printed ship permit.
“Identity stamp.”
Alex licked his finger, touched it to the stamp. A few rainbow waves ran through the thin plastic sheet.
“Good luck,” said the spider.
“That’s it?” asked Alex, utterly confu
sed.
“Yes. That’s it. Is there a problem?”
“Well …”
“The ship is launch-ready. You have your permit. Can I help you with anything else?”
He had nothing to say. The spiders had done their part. The way they were supposed to … in an ideal world. But for some reason, this time there were no long excursions into Alex’s life story, no such questions as: Were you really an enuresis sufferer at the age of five? What were the reasons for your deep emotional attachment to your paralyzed grandmother? Did you drink a lot before the bar fight on Zasada?
“Thank you,” said Alex. “Excuse me.”
“Yes?”
“No … nothing.”
He turned and started to walk toward the door, feeling the gaze of all the spiders on his back.
What in the world was going on?
Was this their customer appreciation day?
Were quality assurance inspectors watching every spider room employee?
Did Alex’s face remind the spider of her high school sweetheart?
Too good to be true was also bad. The guard looked at Alex in surprise. Then asked, “That bad, eh?”
“Yeah … seems like it …”
“Early this morning, another spesh … the guy barely walks in, then rushes out all red in the face, hands shaking. Turns out he’s missing some info about relatives on his mother’s side. They told him to go get it. Three days’ running around at least, he said. No one’s ever been interested in these relatives, and now all of a sudden … For some insurance discount, can you believe that? For his own good. And the ship he’s been hired on is leaving tonight.”
The guard laughed without malice, with compassion, even. He himself must have had occasion to deal with the spiders.
“Insurance is a good thing,” said Alex. Nodded to the guard and went on to the transit platform, left by someone nearby. Maybe it had even been left there by that other spesh, the unfortunate guy who was now fighting with the spiders of the imperial archives.
According to the papers, his ship was waiting not in the hangar, but right out on the landing field. This probably meant it had not been on the planet for very long. Alex stood on the platform, lightly holding onto the handrail—a part of his specialization, imprinted through repetition, was the habit of always having at least three balance points when on a moving object. The platform glided out into the main tunnel and hurtled along at full speed underneath the landing field.
Alex suddenly realized what had been bothering him from the very beginning.
The right to choose his own crew.
Things like that just weren’t done. Well, to be exact, they could be done, but only with the vessels built on this planet. But Mirror had been assembled on Earth.
Someone had to have been in charge of the ship on its way to Quicksilver Pit. Okay, so it may have not been a full crew; it could have been the bare minimum—a pilot, a navigator, and a power engineer. But to hire people for a one-way trip and then to start looking for a whole new crew on another planet—that was absurd. Earth could offer a far better choice of specialists than a colony world, even a well-developed one.
And then there was the useful tradition of keeping at least one member of the previous crew aboard. Every ship had its own unique character, and an experienced person could often save not only time and money, but the very life of the vessel.
Weird …
The platform slowed down, stabilized under an exit shaft, and slowly started rising. Sixty-five feet up, through layers of rock and then the concrete pad of the landing field … Alex glanced at the Demon. It seemed thoughtful and wary.
Right. Something was odd, but what could it be …? It was like that old joke about speshes that had been making its rounds among naturals for the last hundred years—“I smell a rat, but where is it?”
“But we needed the money. We couldn’t let the girl die, could we?” Alex asked the Demon.
Judging by the little devil’s face, they very well could have. So what was up?
The ship was an experimental model? Something dangerous, still being tested—trick a crew into it, and watch what happens? Not likely. Judging by the papers, it was a very good ship, and it had no unexpected novelties. All the equipment was standard. A dangerous route, perhaps? Also bull. People got lured into danger by money, insurance, discounts … anything but lies. There would always be volunteers to stick their heads into a lion’s jaws, why make people do it against their will?
Something barely legal? The same objections applied.
So it wasn’t about the ship. Everything was always about people, not metal.
Alex shook his head and tried to toss his doubts away. Not for good … just to put them away into a far corner of his mind.
The platform slid out through the open aperture of a hatch, wobbled a little as it adjusted to the new bearing, and sailed on over the landing field. After a few seconds, Alex really did forget all his troubles.
He was home… .
Although it had lost its former prominence, the spaceport was still fully alive. Two shuttles were landing simultaneously. At a distance, Alex identified them as a couple of old Manta Rays, maybe the third or fourth model. He guessed what they were not so much by their shape as by the piloting trajectory and landing speed. In the middle of the field, spreading wide the three rings of its supports, stood a heavy Cachalot freighter, probably of the maximum tonnage allowable in this spaceport. From it crawled a line of auto-loaders clutching tanks and containers in their grippers. Working on a delicate pleasure ship, Otter, were small repair-robots that crawled along the ship’s surface, checking and repairing the skin.
Here was the only place worth living. Here and in flight.
Alex was smiling.
His mood was no longer affected by the dull grayness of the sky, where smog and rain clouds blended into a foul-smelling cocktail. Above this sky was another, clear and boundless, created for the freedom of flight … for him personally.
Then the platform skirted the Otter, and Alex saw his own ship. Mirror stood in the launch-ready position. It looked as though a giant discus hurled by a titan had stopped in midair and remained, hovering above the ground, in no hurry to soar into the sky. A bio-ceramic disc of ninety-eight point four feet in diameter, six supports, three main engines in a slightly unusual arrangement clustered in the stern … well, that might even be a good thing. The bulge of the bridge deck was slightly larger than average for a vessel of this size. It looked like co-piloting was possible.
Alex swallowed to get rid of a lump in his throat.
Mirror was blindingly beautiful. The perfect ship, with its enlarged bridge, its unusual engine configuration, the tender green of its armor …
It was love at first sight. Just the ship’s appearance was enough.
The same feeling as when a person capable of love is shaken at the sight of a face in a crowd. There might be dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other faces around, but they all are no longer important.
Sometimes Alex regretted not being able to love other humans. But only till he fell in love with a ship.
“Hello …” he whispered, gazing at Mirror.
The platform slowed down. Alex jumped down onto the concrete and walked up to the ship. Reached over, touching the armor carefully with just his fingertips. The bio-ceramic surface was warm and resilient. Alive.
“You know who I am …” said Alex quietly. “Right? You can see me … Hello …”
He went around the ship, touching the armor with his hand as far up as he could reach. The ship was silent. It was studying him, too.
“Do you like me?”
Now he was glad that there was no one aboard. This was his moment. Or, rather, he shared this moment with the ship.
“Receive your captain.”
The identity chip below his collarbone remained motionless. Mirror had not requested a full identity check. And that was nice. It was a sign of reciprocity. Of trust.
A hatch opened overhead, and down slid a ladder with a small platform on the bottom end. Alex stepped onto it and let the ship take him up inside.
The cargo bay turned out to be standard. Three high-speed spacesuit blocks, a strapped-in scooter. Alex waited for the skin plating to grow together beneath his feet, stepped off the platform, which had become part of the floor, and walked over to the central hall of the ship.
So far, everything was as usual. The configuration of the ship dictated the layout of the inner quarters, with only one alteration—the side engines had been moved aft and replaced by battle stations. The inspection should always start with them. Then he had to open the envelope with instructions in the captain’s quarters, and only after that, proceed to the bridge. But now he did not give a damn about the prescribed procedure. He started walking toward the bridge. The ship ran a gentle wave of light in front of him along the hallway, adjusting to his speed rather than setting the pace.
“Captain’s access,” said Alex, stopping in front of a hatch.
This time, his identification chip pulsated. The ship could not give him complete control without a full identity check.
Then the hatch door drew itself into the wall.
The bridge was indeed constructed for two pilots. Alex stood for a moment, evaluating the small oval space—the screens in the walls shone with a matte whiteness, the pilot chairs were open, the reserve panels fully charged.
All was normal. He had been afraid that a two-person bridge on such a small ship might turn out to be uncomfortable. But so far he saw no such thing. The captain’s pilot’s chair was slightly in front of the other one—an appropriate symbol. Maybe two pilots would even be a good thing.
Although a lot depended on who became the co-pilot.
Alex walked over to the pilot’s chair. Lay down, fastened himself in manually.
The ship waited patiently.
Alex closed his eyes.