He also loved the sound of his own voice, whether the person he was talking to had time to listen or not.
“There you are, Mr. Jatt,” he said one day, stopping me as I was crossing the observation deck. “I’ve been looking for you. I have a question.”
I sighed, but not so he could tell. “What can I do for you, Mr. Balcescu?” Like I didn’t have anything better to do coming up on twelve hours ‘til Rainwater Hub than answer questions from seat-meat. Sorry, that’s what we call passengers sometimes. Bad habit. But I hate it when people think they’re on some kind of a pleasure cruise, and that just because I’m four feet tall and my voice hasn’t broken yet I’m the best choice to find them a comfy pillow or have a long chat about the business they’re going to be doing planetside. What a lot of civilians don’t get is that this is the Confederation Starship Lakshmi, and when you’re on my ship, it’s serious business. A cabin boy is part of the crew like anyone else and I’ve got real work to do. Ask Captain Watanabe if you think I’m lying.
Anyway, this Balcescu was a strange sort of fellow — young and old at the same time, if you know what I mean. He had all his hair and he wasn’t too wrinkled but his face was thin and the rest of him wasn’t much huskier. He couldn’t have been much older than my cabin-mate Ping, which would make him late thirties, maybe forty at the most but he dressed like an old man, or like someone out of an old movie — you know, those ancient films from Earth where they wear coats with patches on the elbows and loose pants and those things around their necks. Ties, right. That’s how he dressed — but no tie, of course. He wasn’t crazy, he just thought he was better than everyone else. Wanted you to know that even though he was some kind of language scientist, he was artistic. It wasn’t just his clothes — you could also tell by the things he said, the kind of the music he listened to. I’d heard it coming out of his cabin a couple of times — screeches like cats falling in love, crashes like someone banging on a ukulele with a crescent wrench. Intellectual stuff, in other words.
“I can’t help but noticing that much ado is being made of this particular stop, Mr. Jatt,” he said when he stopped me on deck. “But I went through four Visser rings on the way out to Brightman’s Star and nobody made much of that. Why such a fuss over this one, this…what do they call it?”
“People call Rainwater Hub ‘the Waterhole’,” I told him. “You can call it a fuss, but it’s dead serious business, Mr. Balcescu.”
“Why don’t you call me Stefan, my young friend — that would be easier. And I could call you Rolly — I’ve heard some of the others call you that.”
“Couldn’t do it, sir. Regs don’t allow it.”
“All right. How about something else, then? You could call me something amusing, like ‘Mr. B’…”
I almost made a horrified face, but Chief Purser always says letting someone know you’re upset is just as rude as telling them out loud. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just keep calling you Mr. Balcescu, sir. It’s easier for me.”
“All right, then, Mr. Jatt. So why is Rainwater Hub such a serious business?”
I did my best to explain. To be honest, I don’t understand all the politics and history myself — that’s not our job. Like we rocket-jocks always say, we just fly ‘em. But here’s what I know.
When Balcescu said he went all the way out to Brightman’s Star and there was no fuss about wormhole transfers, he was right, but that’s because he’d left from the Libra system and his whole trip had been through Confederation space. All those Visser rings he went through were “CO amp;O” as we say — Confederation Owned and Operated. But when he hopped on the Lak’ to join us on our run from the Brightman system to Col Hydrae, well, that trip requires one jump through non-Confederation space — the one we were about to make.
Not only that, but for some reason not even Doc Swainsea can explain so I can understand, the Visser ring here at Rainwater is hinky, or rather the wormhole itself is. Sometimes it takes a little while until the conditions are right, so the ships sort of line up and wait — all kinds of ships, the most you’ll ever see in one place, Confederation, X-Malkin, Blessed Union, ordinary Rim traders, terraform scouts out of Covenant, you name it. They call it the Waterhole because most of the time everybody just…shares. Even enemies. Nobody wants to shut down the hub when it means you could wind up with an entire fleet stranded on this side of the galaxy. So there’s a truce. It’s a shaky one, sometimes. Captain Watanabe told us once in the early days the Confederation tried to arrest a Covenant jumbo at another hub, Persakis out near Zeta Ophiuchus — the Convenant had been breaking an embargo on the Malkinates. Persakis was shut down for most of a year and it took twenty more for everyone to recover from that, so now everybody agrees there’s no hostilities inside a hub safety zone — like predators and prey sharing a waterhole on the savannah. Once you get there, it’s sanctuary. It’s… Casablanca.
I mentioned I like old Earth movies, didn’t I?
After I’d explained, Balcescu asked me a bunch more questions about how long we’d have to wait at Rainwater Hub and who else was waiting with us. For a guy who’d traveled to about fifteen or twenty different worlds, I have to say he didn’t know much about politics or Confederation ships, but I did my best to bring him up to speed. When he ran out of things to ask, he thanked me, patted me on the head, then walked back to the view-deck. Yeah, patted me on the head. I guess nobody told him that any member of a Confederation crew can break a man’s arm using only one finger and thumb. He was lucky I had things to do.
The weird stuff started happening as we entered the zone. Captain Watanabe and Ship’s Navigator Chinh-Herrera were on the com with Rainwater Hub Command when things started to get scratchy. At first they thought it was just magnetar activity, because there’s a big one pretty close by — it’s one of the things that makes Rainwater kind of unstable. The bridge lost Hub Command but they managed to latch onto another signal — com from one of Rainwater’s own lighters — and so they saw the whole thing on visual, through a storm of interference. Chinh-Herrera showed it to me afterward so I’ve seen it myself. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t.
First there was the huge alien ship, although even after several views it takes a while to realize it is a ship. Shaped more like a jellyfish or an amoeba, all curves and transparencies, and not particularly symmetrical. In another circumstance you might even call it beautiful — but not when it’s appearing out of a wormhole where it’s not supposed to be. The Visser ring wasn’t supposed to open for another several hours, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to open to let something out.
Then that… thing appeared. The angry thing.
It was some kind of volumetric display — but what kind, even Doc Swainsea couldn’t guess — a three-dimensional projected image, but what it looked like was some kind of furious god, a creature the size of small planet, rippling and burning in the silence of space. It just barely looked like a living creature — it had arms, that’s all you could tell for certain, and some kind of glow around the face that might have been eyes. Its voice, or the voice of the alien ship projecting it, thundered into every com of every ship within half a unit of Rainwater Hub. Nobody could understand it, of course — not then — it was just a deafening, scraping roar with bits along the edges that barked and twittered. “Like a circus dumped into a meat grinder, audience and all,” Chinh-Herrera said. I had to cover my ears when he played it for me.
If it had stopped there it would have been weird and frightening enough, but right after the monstrous thing went quiet some kind of weapon fired from inside it — from the ship itself, cloaked behind the volumetric display. It wasn’t a beam so much as a ripple — at the time you couldn’t even see it, but when we played it back you could see the moment of distortion across the star field where it passed — and the nearest ship to the Visser ring, a Malkinate heavy freighter, flew apart. It happened just as fast as that — a flare of white light and then the freighter was gone, leaving nothing but debris too small to see on the lighter’s com feed. Thirteen hundred men dead. Maybe they were X-Malkins and they didn’t believe what we believe, but they were still shipmen like us. How did it feel to have their ship, their home, just disappear into fragments around them? To be suddenly thrown into the freezing black empty?