“Company authorized?” she asked.
“I don’t care,” I said.
“What about Ray?” Suzy asked. “Is he going to sit here drinking tea while I work for my pay?”
I smiled. They had a bickering, love-hate thing going. “No, Ray can do something useful as well. He can take a look at the q-planes.”
“Nothing wrong with those planes,” Ray said.
I took off my old Ashanti Industrial bib cap, scratched my bald spot and turned to the jib man.
“Right. Then it won’t take you long to check them over, will it?”
“Whatever, Skip.”
The thing I liked about Ray was that he always knew when he’d lost an argument. He gathered his kit and went out to check over the planes. I watched him climb the jib ladder, tools hanging from his belt. Suzy got her facemask, long, black coat, and left, vanishing into the vapour haze of the docks, boot heels clicking into the distance long after she’d passed out of sight.
I left the Blue Goose, walking in the opposite direction to Suzy. Overhead, the bulk carriers slid in one after the other. You heard them long before you saw them. Mournful, cetacean moans cut down through the piss-yellow clouds over the port. When they emerged, you saw dark hulls scabbed and scarred by the blocky extrusions of syntax patterning, jibs and q-planes retracted for landing and undercarriages clutching down like talons. The carriers stopped over their allocated wells and lowered down on a scream of thrust. Docking gantries closed around them like grasping skeletal fingers. Cargo-handling ’saurs plodded out of their holding pens, some of them autonomous, some of them still being ridden by trainers. There was a shocking silence as the engines cut, until the next carrier began to approach through the clouds.
I always like watching ships coming and going, even when they’re holding my own ship on the ground. I couldn’t read the syntax, but I knew these ships had come in all the way from the Rift. The Aquila Rift is about as far out as anyone ever goes. At median tunnel speeds, it’s a year from the centre of the Local Bubble.
I’ve been out that way once in my life. I’ve seen the view from the near side of the Rift, like a good tourist. It was far enough for me.
When there was a lull in the landing pattern, I ducked into a bar and found an Aperture Authority booth that took Ashanti credit. I sat in the seat and recorded a thirty-second message to Katerina. I told her I was on my way back, but that we were stuck on Arkangel for another few hours. I warned her that the delay might cascade through to our tunnel routing, depending on how busy things were at the Authority’s end. Based on past experience, an eight-hour ground hold might become a two-day hold at the surge point. I told her I’d be back, but she shouldn’t worry if I was a few days late.
Outside a diplodocus slouched by with a freight container strapped between its legs.
I told Katerina I loved her and couldn’t wait to get back home.
While I walked back to the Blue Goose, I thought of the message racing ahead of me. Transmitted at light-speed up-system, then copied into the memory buffer of the next outgoing ship. Chances were, that particular ship wasn’t headed to Barranquilla or anywhere near it. The Aperture Authority would have to relay the message from ship to ship until it reached its destination. I might even reach Barranquilla ahead of it, but in all my years of delays that had only happened once. The system worked all right.
Overhead, a white passenger liner had been slotted in between the bulk carriers. I lifted up my mask to get a better look at it. I got a hit of ozone, fuel and dinosaur dung. That was Arkangel all right. You couldn’t mistake it for any other place in the Bubble. There were four hundred worlds out there, up to a dozen surface ports on every planet, and none of them smelled bad in quite the same way.
“Thom?”
I followed the voice. It was Ray, standing by the dock.
“You finished checking those planes?” I asked.
Ray shook his head. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. They were a little off-alignment, so—seeing as we’re going to be sitting here for eight hours—I decided to run a full recalibration.”
I nodded. “That was the idea. So what’s the prob?”
“The prob is a slot just opened up. Tower says we can lift in thirty minutes.”
I shrugged. “Then we’ll lift.”
“I haven’t finished the recal. As it is, things are worse than before I started. Lifting now would not be a good idea.”
“You know how the tower works,” I said. “Miss two offered slots, you could be on the ground for days.”
“No one wants to get back home sooner than I do,” Ray said.
“So cheer up.”
“She’ll be rough in the tunnel. It won’t be a smooth ride home.”
I shrugged. “Do we care? We’ll be asleep.”
“Well, it’s academic. We can’t leave without Suzy.”
I heard boot heels clicking toward us. Suzy came out of the fog, tugging her own mask aside.
“No joy with the rune monkeys,” she said. “Nothing they were selling I hadn’t seen a million times before. Fucking cowboys.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’re leaving anyway.”
Ray swore. I pretended I hadn’t heard him.
I WAS ALWAYS the last one into a surge tank. I never went under until I was sure we were about to get the green light. It gave me a chance to check things over. Things can always go wrong, no matter how good the crew.
The Blue Goose had come to a stop near the AA beacon that marked the surge point. There were a few other ships ahead of us in the queue, plus the usual swarm of AA service craft. Through an observation blister I was able to watch the larger ships depart one by one. Accelerating at maximum power, they seemed to streak toward a completely featureless part of the sky. Their jibs were spread wide, and the smooth lines of their hulls were gnarled and disfigured with the cryptic alien runes of the routing syntax. At twenty gees it was as if a huge invisible hand snatched them away into the distance. Ninety seconds later, there’d be a pale green flash from a thousand kilometres away.
I twisted around in the blister. There were the foreshortened symbols of our routing syntax. Each rune of the script was formed from a matrix of millions of hexagonal platelets. The platelets were on motors so they could be pushed in or out from the hull.
Ask the Aperture Authority and they’ll tell you that the syntax is now fully understood. This is true, but only up to a point. After two centuries of study, human machines can now construct and interpret the syntax with an acceptably low failure rate. Given a desired destination, they can assemble a string of runes that will almost always be accepted by the aperture’s own machinery. Furthermore, they can almost always guarantee that the desired routing is the one that the aperture machinery will provide.
In short, you usually get where you want to go.
Take a simple point-to-point transfer, like the Hauraki run. In that case there is no real disadvantage in using automatic syntax generators. But for longer trajectories—those that may involve six or seven transits between aperture hubs—machines lose the edge. They find a solution, but usually it isn’t the optimum one. That’s where syntax runners come in. People like Suzy have an intuitive grasp of syntax solutions. They dream in runes. When they see a poorly constructed script, they feel it like toothache. It affronts them.
A good syntax runner can shave days off a route. For a company like Ashanti Industrial, that can make a lot of difference.
But I wasn’t a syntax runner. I could tell when something had gone wrong with the platelets, but I had to trust that Suzy had done her job. I had no other choice.