“The damned plague is—seems—unbeatable. After half the crew was dead, Acting Captain Kahr took extreme steps to save the rest of us. She cut the stardrive engines and, retro-firing, slowed us to a stop; then she had the bodies jettisoned. We moved the remaining crew from room to room and opened outside hatches and interior doors, hoping the vacuum would kill the disease. Finally Lieutenant Kahr even jettisoned some of those who had shown symptoms. There was—a mutiny. We killed those who fought. But it was no use. It was all for nothing. All that blood. For nothing.”
He frowned in the darkness as the memories came flooding back. “People just kept dying,” he said. “Maybe the contagion had already spread to everyone during the incubation period. Nearly everyone had had contact with everyone else, at least indirectly, during our return flight. Or maybe it spread through the air ducts, even after we switched to the back-up system. I don’t know. I just don’t know. All the med facilities this ship has—yet nothing worked.”
There was a long silence; Akklar watched the lights blink on and off, listened to the hum of the instruments, smelled the clean, heavy smell of machine. He set the vocoder down carefully on the armrest and looked a final time at the viewscreen filled with stars. “I should close with some . . . some memorable last words,” he said, not lifting the vocoder but pushing the on-button with his thumb. His voice sounded hollow. “But I seem to have run out of words.” A moment passed, and he looked out into the stars, saw children’s faces, a salmon net, saw the ship within that net, not struggling but hanging by its gills like the time the net had torn and the fishing crew had spent all afternoon taking but one six-pound King. “No,” he said. “I don’t have any final words at all.”
Slowly standing, he walked quietly from the room—passing this time through a door to his left. The door closed behind him with the softest of whispers.
He moved along the corridors toward the ship’s belly, planting plastic explosives in various niches and linking up the fuse wire. He thought he heard fire doors close behind; he told himself it was only his imagination. The fire- control panel along the baseboard began to hiss. By the time he reached the warhead vault, the steam from the panel had turned to foam and lay like giant puffy snakes around his legs.
The vault door opened—halfway, immediately closed again. The hissing grew louder. The foam was now up to his thighs and climbing rapidly. He tried the door button again. Still no response. He found it ironic that the ship was malfunctioning just at the time the last of the crew was about to die. But the fact that the door would not open did not matter anyway. The chain reaction from the plastic explosives would trigger the warheads whether or not the door was open. He mashed a handful of explosive into the corner of the door, jabbed in both the relay and detonator fuses, and stepped back, sloshing through the foam. He paused, trying unsuccessfully to remember Judanya’s face.
The foam was to his chest.
He squeezed the detonator.
A dull, faraway boom echoed through the ship, and back on the bridge all the multi-colored lights on the instrument panels went black. On the main viewscreen, the stars quite suddenly winked out.
Finally she has rid herself of the last of them—the humans, the diseased vermin. And she has saved herself from becoming a crippled hulk. The fire doors buffered the explosion; the flooding of herself short-circuited all but one of the wads of explosive.
Now her intelligence moves through herself—checking, re-checking. Relays click. Circuits buzz. Signals indicate a jagged hole in hull Subsection 37c. Instantly she activates her self-repair units. Liquid sealant oozes and hardens to plug minor holes. Duralloy plates are rigged and methodically secured to close the major one. Her secondary monitor system then surveys damage to all systems and files extensive reports with her central computer banks. Again she sets the self-repair units to humming, and one by one the damaged areas are repaired or replaced. Damage to the Severs-stardrive engines has been extensive; this too is corrected.
Now she checks her position. Alarms sound. She is off course and hanging dead in space.
Reports and corrections flow through herself in a steady stream. Time passes. Scanners and medi-probes scrutinize those bodies still aboard ship. All are lifeless. The plan has been successful. All crew members having been exposed to the virus, all were expendable; she could not allow possible contagion to occur by bringing them home. To insure that, she sucked the virus spores into her air ducts, transferred them each time Kahr ordered an airlock opened, infected the food and water supply whenever possible.
A low rumbling begins, climbs to a piercing shriek as she starts her great Severs-stardrive engines. On the bridge the lights dance dizzily as she calculates the course to Earth and feeds corrections to Navigation. Rockets fire.
She moves—invulnerable, disease-free. Mother and mistress to the shuttlecraft which service her,
SWANWATCH YOON HA LEE
Officially, the five exiles on the station were the Initiates of the Fermata. Unofficially, the Concert of Worlds called them the swanwatch.
The older exiles called themselves Dragon and Phoenix, Tiger and Tortoise, according to tradition based in an ancient civilization’s legends. The newest and youngest exile went by Swan. She was not a swan in the way of fairy tales. If so, she would have had a history sung across the galaxy’s billions of stars, of rapturous beauty or resolute virtue. She would have woven the hearts of dead stars into armor for the Concert’s soldiers and hushed novae to sleep so ships could safely pass. However, she was, as befitted the name they gave her, a musician.
Swan had been exiled to the station because she had offended the captain of a guestship from the scintillant core. In a moment of confusion, she had addressed him in the wrong language for the occasion. Through the convolutions of Concert politics, she wound up in the swanwatch.
The captain sent her a single expensive message across the vast space now separating them. It was because of the message that Swan first went to Dragon. Dragon was not the oldest and wisest of the swanwatch; that honor belonged to Tortoise. But Dragon loved oddments of knowledge, and he could read the calligraphy in which the captain had written his message.
“You have good taste in enemies,” Dragon commented, as though Swan had singled out the captain. Dragon was a lanky man with skin lighter than Swan’s, and he was always pacing, or whittling appallingly rare scraps of wood, or tapping earworm-rhythms upon his knee.
Swan bowed her head.
“Of course I can read it, although it would help if you held the message right side up.”
Swan wasn’t illiterate, but there were many languages in the Concert of Worlds. “This way?” Swan asked, rotating the sheet.
Dragon nodded.
“What does it say?”
Dragon’s foot tapped. “It says: ‘I look forward to hearing your masterpiece honoring the swanships.’ Should I read all his titles, too?” Dragon’s ironic tone made his opinion of the captain’s pretensions quite clear. “They take up
