fear. Now the stars themselves seemed to threaten him, and perhaps with good reason, He rubbed his temples and peered more intently into the screens.
As observed from the navigation deck of the Sun-Tzu, the ghost of Einstein was squeezing the universe in the implacable fist of his ancient equations, making it seem more eerie and disturbing than Bruno would have thought possible.
The Earth vessel was traveling at just over seventy percent of light-speed, seemingly alone in the vast darkness of interstellar space. Physics had begun to compress the usually unchanging starfield forward and aft of the ship, distorting the one rock-steady constant of space travel. Relativity Doppler-shifted the stars directly in front of the Sun-Tzu into a handful of blazing blue diamonds, while Sol was reduced to a dull red gleam behind them, lost in the hellish wash of the antimatter drive.
In the back of his mind, he saw the hand from the Dream on his shoulder, brown and leathery, knuckles the size of walnuts. Alien, but still familiar. He shivered, pushing the memory away with effort.
One thing could always exorcise his demons, Bruno reflected, and keyed the ship commlink. He hoped that the captain was in the mood for a bit of banter.
'Carol, you there?' Bruno licked his lips a bit nervously, waiting for the reply. Sometimes the emptiness around the ship wore her down as well.
There was a faint crackle over the deck speakers, static born from the relativistic impact of bits of interstellar dust against the eroding forward edge of the Sun-Tzu. 'No, I'm lying on a beach in Australia.' Her voice on the commlink was clear, immediate, though she was half a kilometer away on the other side of the iceball that was the interstellar warship. He smiled despite himself at her flippant tone. A good sign. 'You couldn't find Australia on a map.' 'Map, schmap. I saw it once through a scope out Ceres way. Big brown-and-tan dot in the Pacifist Ocean.”
'That's Pacific Ocean.' She was baiting him a little, Bruno knew. Belter impudence against Flatlander tradition. Carol's tone remained airy, unimpressed. 'Big diff, Flatlander. Looked like a dog turd, actually.' 'What would a Belter know about dogs?' he replied, amused. 'Saw one once, in a Luna zoo. Wear their hearts on their sleeves, don't they?' Pause. 'Okay, okay, Mr.
Precise. They wear their hearts on their forelegs. Happy?' 'Ecstatic. Anyway, we so-called Flatlanders bred dogs that way. Who wants a pet that's hard to read?' 'Explain cats, then.' 'Ummm – point conceded.' Bruno smiled again, the beaked face and sad liquid eyes of the Dream receding still further with Carol's banter. The captain of the Sun-Tzu was better therapy than all the psychists with whom Bruno had worked downside on Earth. Her conversation was filled with typical Belter logic and twisty changes in subject. Practical, ever looking for the loophole. But then, he reminded himself, Carol had smuggled a cargo or three past the goldskin UN police back in the Belt.
Before the kzin came, and everything changed. 'Turds,' Carol's voice continued on the commlink in a patently false academic tone, 'are a subject I know – I worked recycler maintenance for years before earning my pilot chip.' There was a pause for effect. 'And of course, I worked with men a lot.' 'You have such a winning grasp of the language,' Bruno sniffed in mock insult. 'And oh so diplomatic, too.' He could feel the worry lines around his scalp scars smooth. He had taken this momentary break to snap out of his mood, and it was working gloriously. Carol was not to be outdone, however. 'You should talk. What's next – flowers?”
'Well, flowers spring forth from turds… ' She snorted. 'An overstretched metaphor, and poorly chosen besides. I was hoping this talk of flowers was turning to romance.' A wounded pause. 'Are you attempting to romance me, shipmate? You should read my poetry sometime.”
'What? All these years together and you've been writing poetry in secret?”
'Ummm. You're surprised an old smuggler like me can have a secret or two, Tacky?”
'No, pleased. Not that you're old. But maybe you have crannies and crevices I haven't explored yet.' 'I hope that's a metaphor, you primate.' 'I guess it is – whatever a metaphor might be. Besides, you are the boss. I wouldn't want to be too forward with a superior officer.”
Carol ignored his sally. 'A lady has to keep some of her crannies entirely metaphorical.' Again she paused for an overdone dramatic effect. 'After all, Sun-Tzu is a bit on the small side.' He laughed. Concerns about privacy from a Belter? 'I'm more interested in their, ah… ' 'Capacity? Circumference? Hard to put such matters in my usual dainty, ladylike fashion.' Her tone had become arch, as usual. There was a pleased purr behind her smoky voice. 'I can't wait to see your ladylike poetry. What's the file name?' 'Hey, not so fast. Don't be so forward. A mere few years of squishy carnal intimacy and already you want to caress my lines with your invasive vision? Get your disorderly Flatlander patriarchal eye tracks all over them?' Bruno felt a glow of anticipation. 'Okay, you can recite them. Tonight, in the Honeymoon Suite. A private performance.”
'I'll have to recite them from memory, shipmate. They aren't written down.”
He could almost see the laugh lines on her startanned face, and shifted deliciously in his crash couch. 'Sounds like imaginary poetry to me. Mere mouth music.' 'A base canard! You'll pay for that – tonight, me bucko.'! 'Okay, but remember, it's my turn to be on top. Recital or no recital.' Bruno's worries seemed far away while he thought about Carol.
'Huh! Try to perform your macho acts while I recite poetry?' Mock hurt crept into her tone. 'Art is seldom appreciated!' 'It's that bad, huh?' 'Ooooh! You better not trust my mouth tonight, O critic!' 'Was that 'trust' or 'thrust'?' He paused. 'Either way, I was so looking forward to – ' 'Hey,' Carol interrupted. 'No fair trying to get me hot, Flatlander.' 'Whaddaya mean, 'trying'? Sounds like I've already done it.' Bruno enjoyed the role-playing that took both of them away from the gritty realities of Sun-Tzu and Project Cherubim.
Carol's tone became accusatory. 'More swinging-dick arrogance. You think you can tell that I'm, uh, excited – over the commlink?' 'Well, okay, you Belter pirate. Deny it.' 'No deal. But hey, luv, got to break off. Things need doing here. Romance and recycler maintenance don't mix, do you scan? But thanks for the, ah… interlude.”
Bruno sighed. Carol was right. Playtime was over. 'Aye-aye, Skipper. There's work here, too. 'Bye.”
No point in telling Carol yet of his dark suspicions. Time to get back to work. The image-sharpening program was about to deliver up again. He sighed.
Some fuzziness in his thinking. Slight, but it was there. Bruno had become increasingly reliant on the tranquilizers dispensed by the Sun-Tzu's autodoc. And if Carol knew that he was still having the Dream, she would up the dosage. That was all right with Bruno, up to a point. The mood modifiers helped as the dark gap yawned ever wider between ship and home. He felt both alone – despite Carol – and stealthily watched. But that wasn't a side effect of the drugs. Nor of the nightmare he called the Dream.
For despite the seeming emptiness of the Deep surrounding the Sun-Tzu, Bruno knew in his soul that the black vacuum also held kzin warships.
He blinked at the summary display on the holoscreen in front of him. The data hinted at his diminished mind. Always he felt the familiar itch in his neck, reminding him that he was not Linked. Connected to the Sun-Tzu's computer, he would not need to interpret the orderly ranks and files of complex data before him.
He would know.
Bruno yearned for that feeling. Reading the screens was like doing arithmetic by counting with his fingers. But for now, he had to crawl, knowing that sometime not too far off – soon, soon, he thought longingly
– he would be able to fly again.
With a grimace, he self-consciously used the time-consuming verbal commands and a dataglove to communicate with the shipboard computer. Slow, clunky, inefficient. Bruno ran several diagnostics to be certain of his earlier observations, then asked a few terse questions of the computer, sketching graphs and recalling database log entries with small, precise gestures of his dataglove-clad right hand.
Bruno didn't like the confirmatory datastream scrolling across one of the open holoscreen windows hanging in midair in front of him. The observations were not conclusive, but they still disquieted him.
There were several possible explanations for the transient gravity waves the Forward mass detector had picked up during the last watch. The signals were faint, but Bruno I had finally proven they were definitely not due to sensor malfunction.
Bruno frowned. One interpretation of the signals was that the Sun-Tzu was not alone in deep space, and that one or more kzinti ships were moving on a slow intercept vector toward the Earth vessel.
They were nearly a third of the way to the Wunderland colony at Alpha Centauri. Relativity being what it was, the kzin could not possibly have detected the Sun-Tzu and launched spacecraft in response. Bruno's worried frown deepened.
