A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2) Read online

  DON’T LET ANYBODY KID YOU, space travel is not romantic or thrilling. The smell is such that you wish somebody would bring back the common cold. The same seven weeks that pass in the blink of an eye when you’re growing starstones in Terranova’s Frisbee can seem like seven years breathing Terran air on board a spaceship between planets. Eating was the nearest thing to recreational activity that we had on board. The food, and I employ the term loosely, was vacuum-packed, freeze-dried, and reconstituted. It was stored in lumoil packets and nuked in the microwave one minute before eating and then sucked out through a straw. It was uniformly bland in taste and texture and had the sole virtue of being compact. “The savor of the mornings was a great delight,” Crip remarked morosely one morning (ship’s time) at breakfast. “Who said that?”

  “Christopher Columbus. On his first trip over. Only took him thirty-three days. And the sun shone the whole way.”

  “Only took Apollo 114 days, 6 hours, 45 minutes, and 39.9 seconds to get to Luna,” Caleb said, equally morose. With mutually glum expressions they surveyed what passed for bacon, eggs, and toast on the Hokuwa’a, and sighed heavily in unison.

  We were crowded, and not just with crew. The Hokuwa’a had treadmills bolted to every available square meter of deck, bulkhead, struts, spars, and I-beams, in the galley and down the companion ways. Those treadmills represented Charlie’s victory in the bitterest battle we fought over outfitting the First Terranovan Expedition. We had yet, she informed me, to find a way to circumvent the old Ten-Ten Rule, which says that spacers lose ten percent of their bone mass for every ten months spent in zerogee. Her standing orders called for a mandatory two hours a day on a treadmill or the equivalent exercise by all personnel in twenty-four-hour zerogee. If you have 125 people to a ship and 24 hours in a day you need 250 treadmill hours per day. That works out to ten point something treadmills, if you are willing to have them going day and night. On a ship the size of an Express I wasn’t. In vain did I point out that we would be in transit for less than two months and without gee for less than six. “You want a bunch of people with spaghetti where their muscles used to be when we get to the Belt?” Charlie demanded. Mother Mathilda concurred, gently but firmly. I could have ignored my sister, but there is something about the pronouncements of a nun. I okayed the treadmills.

  Mother Mathilda was the head of our contingent of the Sisters of St. Anne, ten of them, from a nursing and teaching order. I figured one of the first things we’d do upon arrival in the Belt was set up a primary school for the Belters’ kids. It would be good public relations; with Terra-Luna Mines and Standard Oil and Solar bidding against us we were going to need all the leverage we could get to meet our tonnage quota. Helen Ricadonna had set a ten-year completion date for Island Two; I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her we’d fallen short. I wanted those miners to want to sell to us, if possible without us getting into a bidding war with the other buyers. It wouldn’t hurt to bribe the sellers with their kids’ education, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt the kids.

  In spite of every effort on my part we’d wound up with supercargo, too. “I still don’t know why we had to bring him,” Simon said. He was unhappy enough about the addition of the Sisters of St. Anne to the roster, and Simon Turgenev in zerogee was already unhappy just on general principles. “We’ve got astrographers, pro and am, up the wazoo. What the hell do we need with another?”

  “A representative of the Royal Geographical Society lends the expedition a certain, shall we say, cachet,” Whitney Burkette said austerely. “The prestige of the Society is not inconsiderable, don’t you know.”

  “I don’t know that prestige counts for all that much with somebody who’s head-down ass-up grubbing for uranium in the Belt,” Simon said. A biotech pulled her way down the companionway. Simon ducked her feet and grabbed for another handhold. In our silver-blue jumpsuits we looked like globs of mercury rolling up and down a test tube.

  “My dear fellow,” Whitney Burkette said, raising his voice to be heard over the thumping of the treadmill bolted to the bulkhead right next to us, “from the Schomburgk brothers in French Guiana in the 1830s, to the conquering of Everest in the 1950s, to the circumpolar navigation of Luna in the 1990s, the Royal Geographical Society has funded expeditions that have provided sound, solid, sensible research into the makeup of our world. They wish to extend that research farther into the solar system.” Whitney Burkette permitted himself a wintry smile. “History is about chaps, don’t you know. Geography is about maps.” And with that little epigram he sailed off majestically downship.

  “It’s not enough already the binary brat decides he’s coming with us,” Simon moaned in his basso profundo voice, “now we’ve got mapmakers and nuns crawling out of the hatches.” Simon’s brown hair stood up in cowlicks all over his head. His wide, thin-lipped mouth drooped down at the comers of his shovel-shaped jaw. His cavernous brown eyes were mournful. He needed a shave. He always did.

  “I heard that,” Archy said over the communit strapped to my wrist. “Just for that it’s check and mate in four moves, bub.”

  “Hah!”

  “Watch me. Bishop to king’s knight five.”

  “What! Why, you little—”

  I looked at Simon. “Just swear to me you plugged the Asimov inhibitors into him before anything else when you transferred him on board. Just swear it. Please?”

  Simon built computers. Sort of. He took other computers apart and mixed up their parts and put them back together again. Then he wrote software to make them run better, like about one thousand percent faster and with ten times the memory and fifty times the precision, which made their original manufacturers gnash their teeth and tear their hair and give him lots of money to show them how he did it and to do it again. The upshot of all his tinkering was that Simon was a millionaire before he was thirty and bored with it, so when I came along and dangled the prospect of designing a computer capable of running a space habitat in front of him he grabbed at it. To this day he tells anyone who asks and a few who don’t that I drafted him, which is slander and calumny and I make sure I look hurt whenever I hear him say it. The truth is that I rode in like the White Knight and rescued him from the sheer tedium of sitting around counting all that money and he should be grateful. I also introduced him to his loving wife, although I’m never quite sure exactly how grateful he should be to me for that.

  Archy was Simon’s magnum opus. Archy was the most advanced computer in the solar system. Simon built him, provided him with a data resource base equal to none, and gave him the semblance of a personality. Our contact with the Librarians had nudged him over the edge into sentience and Simon had yet to forgive them for it. For that matter, neither had I. Archy was almost as mouthy as Charlie, and for some reason he unnerved people. Human people, that is. The Librarians had offered him an all-expenses paid tour of the Milky Way; he had declined with thanks, and little Elizabeth, Simon and Charlie’s daughter, had gone instead. Simon had yet to forgive Archy for that, either. But when Archy said he was ready to come with us to the Belt, he’d cut our lead time in half. Loading computers takes time, even for Simon, and even into a ship the size of an Express.

  Panati, the interim mayor of Ellfive, or Terranova, as I supposed I must accustom myself to calling it, had generously offered the Orion ship Theodore Taylor to carry us to Ceres orbit. I extended my gracious thanks to the mayor and told him and the interim Habitat Assembly that I wanted at least four ships, one of them an armed scout. I also demanded one of Boeing’s new experimental 1X1 shuttles with the tandem-rig robot arm and a complete set of waldo remotes, specifically designed for servicing solarsats and commsats.

  Well. You’d have thought I’d demanded the sacrifice of someone’s firstborn child. First the mayor and then the Habitat Assembly screamed like a Frisbee entrepreneur making only a fifty percent profit. Colony Control, in the reluctant process of disbanding following the One-Day Revolution, made it a high-pitched trio.

  After some squalling m
yself, I allowed the expedition to be pared down to the Taylor and the Freeman Dyson, nuclear-powered sister ships in the Orion class. I slunk out of the assembly’s chambers so obviously a beaten woman that several of the assembly members tried to console me. It was difficult not to burst out laughing right in their faces. Aging, a trifle shabby, and almost obsolete, nevertheless two ships of the same provenance meant burning the same kind of fuel and stocking the same kind of spare parts, which in turn meant more cargo space to jam pack with tomato seeds and toilet seats and hand grenades.

  What little room left in cargo was in flight given over to classes. When we weren’t eating or on the treadmill or whining about the crew complement, we were in training.

  There were 125 people on board the Hokuwa’a. We were physicists, chemists, computer techs, drillers, metallurgists, explosives experts, exogeologists, hydrobotanists, hydroponics techs, communications technicians, engineers, mechanics, riggers, pilots, teachers, tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, doctors, lawyers, and one Indian chief—me. Even excluding the Sisters of St. Anne we were slightly more than half female and would have been more so if I’d had more time for crew selection. Women mass less than men, they eat less food than men, they breathe less air than men, and they are more radiation resistant than men. It was like the old joke—they might not be easier but they sure were cheap, or at least cheaper than men to support in vacuum. A few days out Charlie made some crack about having to defend Simon’s honor. “Not that Simon has all that much honor to defend,” I retorted, “but at last report Belters are four-to-one male. I don’t think finding friends will prove that much of a strain on anyone. Now, come on, Roger’s going to teach us how to grow beans.”

  “And this day started out so well.”

  Roger Lindbergh was teaching a course in basic hydroponics techniques, hand in hand with Zoya Bugolubovo. At the end of the first class Simon looked from Zoya to me and asked, “I was afraid to ask before we set sail; how’d you get Roger to sign on?”

  “No, Simon,” Charlie said, “the question is, how did Star get Zoya to sign on.”

  “There’s no mystery about it,” I said. “She’s the foremost hydrobotanist of our time. Feeding the Belt Expedition presented a challenge.”

  Simon regarded me with a sapient eye. “What’d you do, hire somebody to sleep with Vitaly Viskov and somebody else to take pictures to show Zoya?”

  “I most certainly did not.”

  “Don’t sound so indignant. Actually,” he told Caleb, who was looking amused, “she probably didn’t have to do anything. Viskov’d been pissing and moaning about the trigger-happy imperialist military forces of the American Alliance ever since the One-Day Revolution. He got caught between the Patrol and Jerry Pauling’s bunch in the Frisbee and I hear he almost took a round.” He reflected. “Would have been easier for Star if he had.”

  Charlie nodded. “As it was, all she had to do was sympathize with his outraged feelings, make sure a shuttle was at his disposal, and call General Feodov to make sure Viskov was welcome at Tsiolkovsky Base. Voila.” She grinned. “Star told Roger that Zoya was coming with us and Roger forgot all about leaving the chief agronomist’s position at Ellfive—excuse me, Terranova—and taking the Richard Bradfield Chair in Agronomy at Texas A and M and becoming Farmer Emeritus and a legend in his own time.”

  I ignored them. I was practiced at it. When Roger and Zoya were through with us, we all sat down together to learn fiber optics for intraship communications and suprasonics for extraship communications from Maile Kuakini. Bolly Blanca had put the big Hawaiian’s name forward for consideration to run communications for the expedition and after an interview I hired her on. She was the exception to my woman-cheap/man-expensive rule, though: she massed almost as much as Caleb did. She had small, merry brown eyes that saw the joke in everything, even when there wasn’t one, and had a cheerful smile for every occasion. She always agreed wholeheartedly with the opinions expressed by the last person she talked to. She was the least likely candidate for ulcers I had ever met.

  Next was a series of lessons in how to read and maintain an Express ship’s inertial-measurement unit, or space compass, which Sam Holbrook tied into astronomy lessons from charts projected onto the galley bulkhead. Then everyone sat at the feet of Don Albach, our most experienced pressure suit maintenance technician, who taught an intensive forty-hour course in fifty-hour p-suit reconditioning.

  Down in engineering powertechs instructed in the manufacture of electricity and water from oxygen and hydrogen through the use of fuel cells, in case Murphy struck and something went wrong with the E-generators. Waste management operators gave lessons in how to flush the toilets, a procedure that, on an Orion Express, practically required an advanced degree from CalTech. They also taught us how to change the molecular sieves that purified cabin atmosphere and how to vacuum the filter screens on the air-conditioning system.

  Charlie gave classes in tooth extraction and emergency appendectomies and tracheotomies and zerogee CPR. Caleb organized the crew into oncall security squads with assigned squad leaders and taught a refresher course in basic weapons and zerogee tactics. I signed up for it and thought Charlie was going to have a stroke. “What happened to my sister the pacifist?” she wanted to know.

  “She’s buried back on Ellfive next to Paddy,” I replied, and Charlie had the grace to look ashamed. When the drill (field-stripping sonic rifles, I was never again not going to know which end did the shooting) was complete, she came up to me and said soberly, “Nothing worthwhile comes without cost, Star.”

  “Now you sound like me,” I said, racking my rifle. “Sometimes the price is too goddam high.”

  “Paddy would have thought it was worth it.”

  Charlie was right. Knowing it didn’t make me feel any better. She tugged at my arm. “Where we going?” I said.

  “Time for your monthly checkup.”

  A pelvic examination at one full gravity is not fun. A pelvic examination at zerogee is even less so. Grumbling loudly, I followed her down to her cramped clinic.

  I’m blond and blue-eyed and come in extra large. Charlie is brunette and petite and chic and every other one of those French adjectives designed to describe those women who make the rest of us feel like milk cows. She has hair as long and as straight as mine; hers is a deep, inky black. Her tilted eyes are big and brown and her skin is the color of fireweed honey. She has a wide, full-lipped mouth that teeters always on the edge of a joyous grin. She’s a year older and thirty-five centimeters shorter than me. What she lacks in height, she more than makes up for in mouth.

  When Helen Ricadonna yanked me off an oil platform in the Navarin Basin to supervise the construction of Ellfive, my first official act was to recruit Charlie. Four hundred thousand kilometers from home is no place to be without one friend in whom you can place absolute trust, even if she did steal your building blocks for the first ten years of your life and your boyfriends for the next ten. When Helen Ricadonna recruited me to ramrod the Belt Expedition, my first official act was to sign on Charlie. One-point-eight AUs from home is no place to be without at least one friend in whom you can place absolute trust, either.

  When the examination was over she sat at her keyboard, playing something circa Franz Joseph II. Her eyes were on a monitor mounted on the wall of the clinic where lines of brightly colored symbols maintained a rolling readout of encoded test results, gobbledygook to the uninitiated. The keyboard was switched to straight piano, no percussion, no brass, no strings.

  Charlie used music to solve particularly hairy medical problems and each specialty had its own composer. Shanghai Wang worked the cardiovascular system because only the hottest jazz could get the heart moving the way Charlie thought it ought to. She used Brahms lullabies for pediatrics and Beethoven for orthopedics. Glenn Miller worked from the neck up, on Charlie’s theory that a clarinet and a saxophone an octave apart were the best stimulants for the little gray cells, her own and the patient’s. Today it was Mozart. />
  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  She grunted.

  “Charlie?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah, you’re as healthy as the proverbial ox.” She stopped playing and surveyed me critically. “You’re starting to look like one, too. Better spend some more time on your treadmill.” She wrote the monitor data to a chartdisk and filed it.

  “Thanks a whole bunch. And the twins?”

  “They’re fine. Did I tell you they’ve decided they are going to be a boy and a girl?”

  “You mentioned it. Charlie, did you ever find out what the hell happened with my implant? This is the twenty-first century. People don’t get pregnant by accident in the twenty-first century. Especially not with twins.” One twin kicked out in contradiction and for an instant a tiny foot was outlined against the silver-blue of my jumpsuit.

  Charlie shrugged. “Most of the time contraceptive implants work. Sometimes they don’t. Yours didn’t.”

  “It did the whole time I was with Grays.”

  She grinned the kind of wicked grin that only another woman can fully appreciate. “Well, it didn’t with Caleb, did it?”

  I looked pointedly at her own bulging belly and said, “It didn’t with Simon, either.”

  “At least I keep it to one at a time,” she said cheerfully.

  “You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you, you bitch?”

  “You bet I am. You know why? It’s because you’re always so—so—” She groped for a moment and then brightened. “Invincible, that’s what you are.”

  I was hurt. “That’s a terrible thing to say. I am not.”

  “It’s what you seem to be,” she said. “Ask anyone who has ever worked an hour for you, friend or foe. You lay track for the Iditarod TGV from Anchorage to Nome over seventy-two hundred of the roughest kilometers in Alaska and you finish it five months ahead of schedule and half a billion under budget. You go out into the Bering Sea in the middle of the worst weather and tides in any ocean, not to mention armed Russians who think the entire northern Pacific Ocean belongs to them anyway, and you bring in the St. Paul discovery well and a super-giant oil field. Then your old college roomie calls up and says, ‘Want to build a space habitat?’ Tell me the truth,” Charlie said, leaning forward, “you probably said something like ‘Might as well. Haven’t got anything better to do.’ Right?”