Engineman (7 page)

Susan... He hadn't asked about his daughter because, in all honestly, he had not thought about her in months.

"I'm sorry." He tried to sound enthusiastic. "How is she?"

Caroline smiled, as if to show that she wasn't taken in by his deception. "She's fine, Ralph. She's twenty-one in a couple of weeks. She's working as an engineer for KVO on Mars."

Mirren grunted a laugh. "Traitor."

"She wants to see you some time."

"Well, next time she's in Europe..."

"I'll send her along." She hesitated. "I have some photos of her, if you're interested. Perhaps we could meet for a meal. How about tonight?"

"Afraid I'm busy tonight," he lied.

"Then some time next week?"

"Okay, why not?" He could always make his excuses when she called.

Caroline smiled. "I'll look forward to that. Look after yourself, Ralph."

He gave an affirmative salute and watched her walk from the bar. He ordered another beer, and when it came he sat and watched the bubbles rise to the foaming head. He reflected that for years he'd lived a life of quiet despair and at times had achieved a state of perverse contentment: only when he was reminded of the past was he filled with a sense of impotent dissatisfaction, a reminder of what might have been, and a hatred of what he had become.

"Mr Mirren? Mr Ralph Mirren?"

He looked up. Two heavies, thick-set and swarthy, obviously Jaeger's bodyguards, stood at the end of his booth.

After three beers Mirren felt distant, removed. Being confronted like this by the bodyguards of a disfigured off-worlder was such a novel turn of events, compared to his usual dreary routine, that his curiosity was aroused.

"Yes?"

"Mr Jaeger," said one of the bodyguards, "is in the Graveyard."

Mirren looked up at the speaker. He was dark, Italian-looking, but obviously a colonist from a planet with gravity greater than Earth's: he was squat, broad, and powerful-looking.

"What does Mr Jaeger want?" he asked.

"That's his business," the other guard answered. "But we have to inform you that he won't be wasting your time."

Curiouser and curiouser... It was certainly his day for meeting people.

"If I were you," the first heavy said, "I'd go and see what he wants. Avenue five, lane three, lot seven."

They nodded fractionally and left the bar.

Mirren sat for another five minutes, drinking his beer and considering the summons. For all their veiled threats, the bodyguards had been too polite to be intimidating. He pulled the pix of Jaeger from the pocket of his flying suit and wondered what the off-worlder might want with him.

He finished his beer and left the bar.

Chapter Four

He walked around the terminal building and across the tarmac towards the quiet eastern perimeter of the spaceport. The sun was rising. The horizon was a blaze of gaudily beribboned strata, tinted rose and umber from the effluvia of the recently erupted Etna. The Graveyard stood in stark silhouette against the sunrise.

In the ten years he'd worked at Orly, Mirren had done his best to avoid the Graveyard, working in the vast lot only when he could find no other flier to take his shift. The last time had been five years ago, when his nostalgia for the hey-day of the Lines had been at its height. Since then, and especially over the last year or two, he'd often gazed across the port to the regimented ranks of the derelict starships receding into the distance, and told himself that for old time's sake he should revisit the last resting place of these mighty behemoths.

He paused and gazed left and right along the phalanx of excoriated and rusting bigships, rising from the tarmac like epitaphs to their own extinction. Dwarfed beneath the rearing hulks, he walked until he came to avenue five. Pushing his own pain at the closure of the Lines to the back of his mind, he experienced a stab of sadness for the 'ships themselves. It was sentimental, he knew, but he nevertheless thought it wrong, unjust, that such magnificent examples of engineering should have been superseded by a form of transportation as effete as the interface portals.

He turned and walked down the avenue, and it was as if he had entered another realm, a nightmare past in which the symbols of his younger days had been perversely maligned by the ongoing process of entropy. One either side, rows of wrecked and dilapidated starships dwindled to vanishing point - bigships and smallships, scout-ships and survey-vessels, colony-liners like compacted cities and planetary ferries, life-boats, tugs, salvage-ships as ugly as deep-sea fish, sun-divers, two-man boats, express cutters and slowboats pushed once by Gamma crews... He slowed his pace, gazing around in wonder. Every type of spatial architecture was represented here: vertical ships as streamlined as needles, horizontal craft like bulky leviathans; squat blocks on bent stanchion-legs like crabs, oval vessels like polished gems. Many gave the impression of being gloriously intact - though Mirren knew that their innards had been ripped out - and many more, tragically, had been strategically dismembered to prevent cannibalisation or salvaging by renegade Enginemen. He passed lots given over to portioned quarters of bigships: tail-sections and lone nose-cones, stranded mid-sections and rearing fins as large as smallships themselves, honeycombed radiation baffles, observation domes, astrodomes, flanks and bulkheads and pitiful cross-sections of 'ships like the carcasses of slaughtered beasts. Perhaps even more devastating than the piecemeal state of the vessels, however, was the attention of the extraterrestrial flora. Some of the smaller 'ships were cocooned, others had their legs and tori enwrapped in clinging skirts of jungle growth. Mirren did not fail to see the irony: for years these vessels had ranged among the stars, vanguards of humankinds' conquest; now the flora of the planets they had conquered was exacting an eloquent revenge.

He found lane three and turned down the narrow aisle. He passed the shell of a rusting smallship, then a bigship missing the domed section of its forward command bridge like the unfortunate victim of some abandoned brain surgery. He came to a halt, there was something painfully familiar about the nose-cone of the bigship which obtruded from its resting place and overhung the lane. The curving panels of its flank were obscured by a beard of purple-leafed vine, but Mirren glimpsed an ornate name-plate through the leaves. He climbed onto the back of a wrecked tug-tractor, reached out and swept aside the vine.

The
Pride of Paramatta
... He repeated the name, savouring the alliteration on his tongue, the flood of memories it provoked. He had never actually pushed the
Paramatta
- it was an early Class II survey vessel decommissioned the very year he graduated - but as a boy he'd often watched it phase into the Sydney spaceport and dreamed of one day becoming an Engineman, never for a second imagining that thirty years later the 'ship would be a thing of the past, and he with it.

He released the vines, allowed them to spring back into place and obscure the name-plate. He jumped down, dusting his hands together, and continued along the lane. He had never before realised quite how beautiful a mausoleum could be.

He came to lot seven. Parked upon it was an old-fashioned perpendicular exploration vessel, an attenuated arrow-head of blue steel. It was tall and proud against the rising sun, intact but for its nose-section fins. Mirren wondered how many planets this 'ship had discovered, how many other suns it had stood proudly beneath.

He looked around the weed-choked tarmac for Jaeger.

"Hello down there!" The cry echoed from high above.

Mirren craned his neck. Halfway up the tapering flank of the bigship, someone stood on a railed observation platform. The grey-suited figure waved. "Mr Mirren! Please, join me."

Mirren crossed the tarmac to the makeshift stairway - a metal chock, an oil barrel - and climbed through the arched hatch. The gloom was pierced by shafts of sunlight slanting in through vacated viewscreens, illuminating dust motes. He climbed a tight spiral staircase, passing levels stripped of fittings and furnishings.

He stepped out onto the observation platform.

Jaeger was leaning against the rail, admiring the view. "Magnificent, is it not, Mr Mirren?"

Mirren glanced from the off-worlder to the vista of superannuated starships spread before him. "Jaeger?"

The off-worlder turned to Mirren and held out his hand. Warily, Mirren shook it. "Jaeger is my little conceit, Mr Mirren. My
nom de plume
. The name is Hunter, Hirst Hunter. I'm delighted to make your acquaintance."

Hunter was a head taller and half as broad again as Mirren. Despite his impressive size, he emanated an aura of casual amiability. He could have passed on Earth for a well-preserved sixty, though living conditions and life expectancy varied so widely on the many planets of the Expansion that he might have been anything from fifty to a hundred standard years old.

The crimson disfigurement covered the left half of his face. On the photograph Mirren had thought it a birthmark, but now he saw that the pustulant mass, raised perhaps a centimetre from the skin, resembled more closely an outgrowth of mould or lichen. His left eye was closed and crusted over, and the side of his mouth was drawn shut and pulled down in a permanent scowl. The remainder of his face was bronzed and smiling, as if bequeathed the humanity so lacking in the ravaged hemisphere.

He was gazing out over the starships, a sad smile on his halved face. He gestured at the graveyard. "I find the sight achingly beautiful. Don't you agree, Mr Mirren?"

"Despite what it represents... yes, I do."

Hunter pointed over the domes, spires and pinnacles of the gathered starships. "Do you see the Boeing cruiser; the 'ship with its navigation bay removed? It was an exploration vessel for the Valkyrie Line, oh... ninety years ago. It surveyed the habitable planets of Kernan's Drift. I was thrilled to come across it today. My homeplanet is Fairweather, the first world it made landfall on in the Drift."

Mirren smiled. Oddly, he felt comfortable in the company of the stranger.

"And now," Hunter said, "they explore new worlds by sending unmanned drones through portals. No romance, no adventure..."

"But cheaper," Mirren said. "More profit for the organisations."

Hunter was sadly shaking his head. "I could weep when I consider the advent of the interfaces, Mr Mirren, and that is no exaggeration."

Mirren glanced at the off-worlder. He was not augmented, but he could have had his console removed.

"Did you push?" he ventured.

Hunter turned to regard Mirren. The crazed, cracked surface of his facial growth was suppurating in the sunlight. "Me? Unfortunately not, Mr Mirren. When I was young I studied to be an Engineman, I wanted nothing more than to push a starship, but I never made the grade. Of course, I could have worked in space, but the thought of working alongside
bona fide
Enginemen would only have served to remind me of my failure."

"You should consider yourself lucky," Mirren said, then stopped himself before he became too self-piteous.

Hunter smiled. "I have something to show you which I think you will find of interest. Please, this way."

Hunter ducked through the hatch and tapped quickly down the spiral stairway. Mirren followed, not for the first time wondering what the off-worlder wanted with him.

They emerged into the fierce sunlight of the new day and walked down the lane side by side. Hunter gestured and they turned right, down an avenue flanked by nothing else but dismembered observation domes and astro-nacelles. Here, the alien plant-life had run riot, shoots and spores finding their way into the accidental glasshouses of the nacelles and domes and blooming in colourful abundance.

Hunter touched Mirren's elbow and indicated to the left. They passed down a wide avenue, then halted before the carcass of a bigship sliced lengthwise, its gaping cross-section cavernous. They climbed a staircase and Hunter led the way along a cat-walk spanning the length of the 'ship above a dense tangle of brambles. They passed through a bulkhead and came into a vast astrodome, humid in the sunlight and home to a hundred varieties of beautiful alien blooms. Their scent filled the air, thick as honey.

They crossed the circular floor to the exit hatch and strode down a corridor, Mirren's curiosity increasing by the second. Hunter pushed open a swing door and stepped through, and Mirren followed. They were in the crew's lounge - a long, comfortably-appointed relaxation area which obtruded through the skin of the 'ship. Hunter strolled up to the vast, concave viewscreen and looked down the length of the bigship. Mirren stopped on the threshold and stared at the great rococo name-plate affixed to the curving flank of the 'ship.

Hunter lifted the mobile half of his mouth. "The
Martian Epiphany
, Mr Mirren. The 'ship you pushed for five years, two of them as team-captain, before your transfer to the
Perseus Bound
, if I am not mistaken."

Mirren crossed the lounge. The air was cloyingly humid, making him feel dizzy. He took in the low, plush loungers, the sunken bunkers in black leather. He was taken back in time fifteen years. Between stints in the tank and hours sleeping in his cabin, he would come down here and stare out at the cobalt-blue magnificence of the
nada
-continuum, shot through with streamers of milky luminescence like streaks in marble which believing Enginemen claimed were the souls of the dead and departed. How many hours had he spent here, gazing out in dazed wonder?