The Starry Rift Part 20

"Forceps," he'd say. "Laser scalpel." Or, sometimes, "Soldering iron."

"What happened to this man?" I asked, feeling I ought to be showing interest in more than just the mechanics of the operation.

"Hold that down," Zeal said, ignoring my question completely. "Cut there. Now make a knot and tie off. G.o.d's teeth, careful."

A little while later, the engine lit up. The transition to thrust weight was sudden and unannounced. The floor shook violently. Equipment clattered off trays. Zeal slipped with a knife, ruining half an hour's work, and swore in one of the ancient trade languages.

"They've lit the drive," he said.

"I thought you asked . . ."

"I did. Now apply pressure here."

We kept on working, even as the ship threatened to shake itself to bits. Scoop instability, Zeal said: it was always rough at first, before the fields settled down. My back began to ache from all the leaning over the table. Yet after what felt like many hours, we were done: the two halves reunited, the interconnects joined, the bone and flesh encouraged to fuse across the divide.

The patient was sewn up, rebooted, and restored to consciousness. I rubbed my back as Zeal spoke softly to the man, answering his questions and nodding now and then.

"You'll be all right," I heard him say. "Just keep away from any cargo lifts for a while."

"Thanks," the cyborg said.

The crewman got up off the table, whole again-or as whole as he would ever be. He walked stiffly to the door, pawing at his healed injuries in a kind of stunned wonderment, as if he had never expected to leave the operating table.

"It wasn't as bad as it looked," Zeal told me, when the patient had gone. "Stick with me, and you'll see a lot worse."

"Does that mean you'll let me stay?"

Zeal picked up an oily rag and threw it my way. "What else would it mean? Clean yourself up and I'll show you to your quarters."

It was a job, and it had got me off Mokmer. As gruesome as working for Zeal might have been, I kept reminding myself that it was a lot better than dealing with Happy Jack's b.u.t.ton men. And in truth, it could have been a lot worse. Gruff as he had been to start with, Zeal gradually opened up and started treating me . . . not exactly as an equal, but at least as a promising apprentice. He chided me when I made mistakes but was also careful to let me know when I had done something well-when I'd sewn up a wound nicely or when I'd wired in a neuromotor implant without causing too much surrounding brain damage. He wouldn't say anything, but the curl of his lip would soften and he'd favor my efforts with a microscopic nod of approval.

Zeal, I came to learn, enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the rest of the Iron Lady's crew. It must have always been that way for ship's surgeons. They were there to keep the crew healthy, and much of their work was essentially benign: the treating of minor ailments, the prescribing of restorative drugs and diets. But occasionally they had to do unspeakable things, things that inspired dread and horror. And no one was beyond the surgeon's reach, not even the captain. If a crewman needed treatment, he was going to get it-even if Zeal and his lobots had to drag the man screaming and kicking to the table.

Most of the accidents, though, tended to happen during port time. Now that we were under flight, sucking interstellar gases into the ramscoop field, climbing inexorably closer to the speed of light, Zeal's work tended to minor operations and adjustments. Days went by with n.o.body to treat at all. During these intervals, Zeal would have me practicing on the lobots, refining my techniques.

Three or four years, Khorog had said. Longer, if Zeal couldn't find a replacement. With only a week under my belt, it seemed like a life sentence aboard the Iron Lady. But I would get through it, I promised myself. If conditions became intolerable, I would just jump ship in the next port of call.

In the meantime I got to know as much of my new home as I was allowed. Large areas of the Iron Lady were out-of-bounds: the rear section was deemed too radioactive, while the front was closed to low-ranking crew members like myself. I never saw the captain, never learned his name. But that still left a labyrinth of rooms, corridors, and storage bays in which I was allowed to roam during my off-duty hours. Now and then I would pa.s.s other crew members, but apart from Khorog, none of them ever gave me the time of day. Zeal told me not to take it to heart: it was just that I was working for him and would always be seen as the butcher's boy.

After that, I began to take a quiet pride in the fear and respect Zeal and I enjoyed. The other crew might loathe us, but they needed us as well. Our knives gave us power.

The lobots were different: they neither feared nor admired us but simply did what we wanted with the instant obedience of machines. They didn't have enough residual personality to feel emotions. That was what I'd been told, anyway, but I still found myself wondering. There were nine of them on the Iron Lady: five men and four women. Looking into their slack, sleepwalker faces, I couldn't help wondering what kind of people they had been before, what kinds of lives they had led. It was true that they must have all committed capital crimes to have become lobots in the first place. But not every planet defined capital crimes in exactly the same way.

I knew there were nine, and only nine, because they came through Zeal's room on a regular basis, for minor tweaks to their control circuitry. I got to know their faces, got to recognize their slumping, shuffling gait as they walked into a room.

One day, however, I saw a tenth.

Zeal had sent me off on an errand to collect replacement parts for one of his machines. I'd taken a wrong turn, then another one, and before I realized quite how lost I was, I had ended up in an unfamiliar part of the Iron Lady. I stayed calm at first, expecting that after ten or twenty minutes of random wandering, I'd find a corridor I recognized.

I didn't.

After thirty minutes became an hour, and every new corridor looked less familiar than the last, I began to panic. There were no markings on the walls, no navigation consoles or color-coordinated arrows. The ship's dark architecture seemed to be rearranging itself as I pa.s.sed, confounding my attempts at orientation. My panic changed to dread as I considered my plight. I might starve before I found my way back to the part of the ship I knew. The Iron Lady was huge, and its living crew tiny. If they had little cause to visit these corridors, it might be years before they found my dead body.

I turned another corner, more in desperation than hope, and faced yet another unrecognized corridor. But there was someone standing at the end of it. The harsh overhead light picked out only her face and shoulders, with the rest of her lost in shadow. I could see from her collar that she wore the same kind of overall as the other lobots. I could also see that she was quite pretty. The lobots were usually shaved to the scalp, to make life easier when their heads had to be opened. This one had a head of hair. It grew out ragged and greasy, tangled like the branches of an old tree, but it was still hair. Beneath it was a pale, almond-shaped face half lost in shadow.

She started back from me, vanishing into deeper shadow and then around a bend at her end of the corridor.

"Wait!" I called. "I'm lost! I need someone to show me the way out of here!"

Lobots never spoke, but they understood spoken instructions. The girl should have obeyed me instantly. Instead she broke into a running shuffle. I heard her shoes scuffing on the deck plating.

I chased after her, catching up with her easily before she reached the end of the next corridor. I seized her by the left arm and forced her to look at me.

"You shouldn't have run. I just need to know how to get out of here. I'm lost."

She looked at me from under the stiff, knotted overhang of her hair. "Who you?" she asked.

"Peter Vandry, surgeon's mate," I said automatically, before frowning. "You talk. You're not meant to talk."

She lifted up her right arm, the sleeve of her overall slipping down to reveal a crude mechanical subst.i.tute for a hand. This clawlike appendage was grafted onto her forearm, held in place by a tight black collar. I thought for a moment that she meant to shock me, but then I realized that she was only making a human gesture, touching the tip of her mechanical hand against the side of her head.

"I . . . talk. Still . . . something left."

I nodded, understanding belatedly. Some of the lobots were clearly allowed to retain more mental faculties than others. Presumably these were the lobots that needed to engage in more complex tasks, requiring a degree of reciprocal communication.

But why had I never seen this one before?

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"I . . . tend." She screwed up her face. Even this stripped-down approximation of normal speech was costing her great effort. "Them. Keep them . . . working."

"What do you mean, them?"

She c.o.c.ked her head behind us, in the direction of wall plating. "Them."

"The engine systems?" I asked.

"You . . . go now." She nodded back the way I had chased her. "Second . . . left. Third right. Then you . . . know."

I let go of her, conscious that I had been holding her arm too tightly. I saw then that both her hands had been replaced by mechanical subst.i.tutes. With a shudder my thoughts raced back to the surgical machine in Zeal's operating room, the one with the feminine hands.

"Thank you," I said softly.

But before I could leave her, she suddenly reached out her left hand and touched the metal to the side of my head, running her fingers against the skin. "Wethead," she said, with something like fascination. "Still."

"Yes," I said, trying not to flinch against the cold touch. "Zeal's talked about putting some implants into me soon, to help with the surgery . . . nothing irreversible, he says . . . but he hasn't done it yet."

Why was I talking to her so openly? Because she was a girl. Because it had been a long time since I'd seen someone who looked even remotely human, let alone someone pretty.

"Don't let," she said urgently. "Don't let. Bad thing happen soon. You okay now. You stay okay."

"I don't understand."

"You stay wethead. Stay wethead and get off ship. Soon as can. Before bad thing."

"How am I supposed to get off the ship? We're in interstellar s.p.a.ce!"

"Your problem," she said. "Not mine."

Then she turned away, the sleeves of her overalls falling down to hide her hands.

"Wait," I called after her. "Who are you? What is . . . what was your name?"

She paused in her stiff shuffle and looked back at me. "My name . . . gone." Then her eyes flashed wild in the shadows. "Second left. Third right. Go now, Peter Vandry. Go now then get off ship."

Zeal and I were midway through another minor procedure when the engagement began. The Iron Lady shook like a struck bell. "G.o.d's teeth!" Zeal said, flinging aside his soldering iron. "What now?"

I picked up the iron and wiped sandpaper across its tip until it was bright again. "I thought the scoop fields were supposed to have settled down by now."

"That didn't feel like a field tremor to me. Felt more like an attack. Pa.s.s me the iron: we'll sew this one up before things get worse."

"An attack?" I asked.

Zeal nodded grimly. "Another ship, probably. They'll be after our cargo."

"Pirates, you mean?"

"Aye, son. Pirates. If that's what they are."

We tidied up the patient as best we could, while the ship continued to shudder. Zeal went to an intercom, bent a stalk to his lips, and spoke to the rest of the crew before returning to me. "It's an attack," he said. "Just as I reckoned. Apparently we've been trying to outrun the other ship for weeks. Quite why no one thought to tell me this . . ." He shook his head ruefully, as if he expected no better.

We were a long way in from the hull, but the impacts still sounded like they were happening next door. I shuddered to think of the energies being flung against the Iron Lady's already bruised armor. "How long can we hold?" I asked.

"Come with me," Zeal said, pushing the goggle up onto his forehead. "There's a reinforced observation bubble not far from here. It's not often you'll get to see close action, so you might as well make the most of it."

Something in Zeal's tone surprised me. He'd been annoyed at the interruption to his surgical work, but he still did not sound particularly alarmed at the fact that we were being shot at by another ship.

What did Zeal know that I didn't?

As he led me to the observation bubble, I finally found the nerve to ask the question I had been meaning to put to him ever since I met the girl in the corridor, several weeks ago. Now that he was distracted with the battle, I a.s.sumed he wouldn't dwell overlong on my questions.

"Mister Zeal . . . that lobot we were just working on . . ."

He looked back at me. "What about it?"

"It seems funny that we can do so much to their brains . . . put stuff in, take stuff out . . ."

"Go on."

"It seems funny that we never give them language. I mean, they can understand us . . . but wouldn't it be easier if they could talk to us as well? At least that way we'd know that they'd understood our instructions."

"Language modules are too expensive. The captain has one, but that's only because a hull spar took out his speech center."

"I'm not talking about cyber modules."

Zeal halted and looked back at me again. Around us, the ship rocked and roared. Emergency alarms sounded from the distance. A mechanical voice intoned warning messages. I heard the shriek of a severed air line.

"What, then?"

"Why do we take out the language center in the first place? I mean, why not just leave it intact?"

"We take the lobots as we get 'em, son. If the speech center's been scooped out . . . it isn't in our power to put it back again."

I steadied myself against a bulkhead, as the floor bucked under us. "Then they're all like that?"

"Unless you know otherwise." Zeal studied me with chilling suspicion. "Wait," he said slowly. "This line of questioning . . . it wouldn't be because you've seen her, would it?"

"'Her,' Mister Zeal?"

"You know who I mean. The other lobot. The tenth one. You've met her, haven't you?"

"I . . ." Zeal had the better of me. "I got lost. I b.u.mped into her somewhere near the back of the ship."

The curl of his lip intensified. "And what did she say?"

"Nothing," I said hurriedly. "Nothing. Just . . . how to find my way back. That's all I asked her. That's all she said."

"She's out of control," he said, more to himself than me. "Becoming trouble. Needs something done to her."

I sensed further questions would be unwise, bitterly regretting that I had raised the subject in the first place. At least the battle was still ongoing, with no sign of any lessening in its intensity. Difficult as it was to look on that as any kind of positive development, it might force Zeal's mind onto other matters. If we had a rush of casualties, he might forget that I'd mentioned the girl at all.

Some chance, I thought.

We reached the observation bubble, Zeal silent and brooding at first. He pulled back a lever, opening an iron shutter. Beyond the gla.s.s, closer than I'd expected, was the other ship. It couldn't have been more than twenty or thirty kilometers from us.

It was another ramscoop, shaped more or less like the Iron Lady. We were so close that the magnetic fields of our scoops must have been meshed together, entangled like the rigging of two sailing ships exchanging cannon fire. Near the front of the other ship, where the scoop pinched to a narrow mouth, I could actually see the field picked out in faint purple flickers of excited, inrushing gas. Behind the other ship was the hot spike of its drive flame: the end result of all that interstellar material being sucked up in the first place, compacted and compressed to stellar core pressures in her drive chamber. A similar flame would have been burning from the Iron Lady's stern, keeping us locked alongside.

The other ship was firing on us, discharging ma.s.sive energy and projectile weapons from hull emplacements.

"They must be pirates," I said, bracing myself as the ship took another hit. "I'd heard they existed but never really believed it until now."

"Start believing it," Zeal grunted.

"Could that ship be the Devilfish ?"

"And what have you heard about the Devilfish?"

"If you take the stories seriously, that's the ship they say does most of the pirating between here and the Frolovo Hub. I suppose if pirates exist, then there's a good chance the Devilfish does as well."