The Wolf Itself (The Kestrel Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  The Wolf Itself

  © 2015 by mikel evins

  http://evins.net/the_wolf_itself/

  The Wolf Itself

  The Kestrel Chronicles, Book 1

  by mikel evins

  1.

  I saw Esgar Rayleigh shuffle past the open hatch of the ship’s infirmary. I paused in my work and watched him go past. According to my clock it should be the middle of the night for him. I thought it over, then stepped through the hatch and followed him.

  He heard my metal feet on the deck and stopped and turned to face me. He was wearing night clothes: a dark blue jumpsuit and light slip-on deck shoes. The Rayleigh family glyph, small and gold and tasteful, floated just before his left breast. His eyes were large and blue and watery and rimmed with red. His thick black mustache was tangled. The stubble on his shaved head was more than usually dark.

  “Doctor,” he said thickly.

  “Are you all right, Captain?” I said.

  “Swell,” he said. “Peachy. Couldn’t be better.”

  His tone contradicted his words. His gaze was unfocused.

  I reached for his wrist with one hand. He pulled it away, drawing back with eyes wide in mock alarm, but then allowed me to take it. His pulse seemed normal enough, though a little elevated. I started a superficial scan.

  “Lev,” he said, “if you want to hold my hand, can we do it in the lift? I’m told the bridge crew has sighted something they think is important.”

  “I see,” I said. I followed him around the curve of the deck to the lift. The companionway curved around the outer edge of the deck. The bulkheads were stress-reinforced graphenes in a dark mahogany color. The deck itself was a matte burgundy and navy polymer with a woven texture, framed in a dark, porous ceramic. Hatches and structural pillars punctuated the companionway at intervals, finished tastefully in brushed metal. The effect was one of restrained elegance. The quality of the materials showed through a veneer of scratches and chips that betrayed the ship’s age.

  Kestrel was a torch. Torches are fast because they accelerate all the time. Because of that, and unlike other, more economical types of ship, they don’t have to fiddle around with efficient transfer orbits and other complications of sane and sensible space travel. They can just point themselves at destinations and go, impelled by their nuclear jets.

  On the other hand, torches cost a fortune to operate. Their mass is mostly fuel and propellant, and they throw it away into space at a prodigal rate. That’s why nobody uses them for ordinary shipping. It’s why everybody knows that if you arrive somewhere on a torch, you must be rich. It’s why torches tend to have expensively appointed interiors. If somebody pays the kind of money it costs to hire one, they expect first-rate appointments.

  For some uses, torches are the only thing that will do. If you want to reach anywhere in the Solar System in weeks or months rather than years, for example, a torch is your only option. If you want to reach a destination whose orbit is unpredictable, like a Jovian dreadnought, only a torch will do. There’s no substitute. The sane and sensible options all need to be able to calculate economical transfer orbits, and those invariably take months or years.

  The constant acceleration gives torches a kind of artificial gravity, and that in turn dictates their architecture. The direction the torch exhaust points is always down except when a ship is docked, or when it’s flipping over mid-course to change from acceleration to deceleration. With the jet shut off, there’s no down. Everything aboard the ship becomes weightless. The rest of the time, though, being aboard a torch is almost like being on the ground. The nose is the top of the ship. The tail is the bottom. Everyone and everything falls down.

  Kestrel’s circular decks were stacked atop one another just like a building’s floors. She had a translucent impact shield at the nose and the white-hot jet of the torch two kilometers below at the other end. All of the working decks were snugged up close behind the shield, as far as possible from the jet. Below them were the light cargo bays, the heavy mount points, and then the fuel and propellant tanks, clustered like grapes around the ship’s spine. Flexible shield membranes of translucent graphene protected the ship’s structure from incidental impacts. The overall effect was something like a jellyfish—if a jellyfish had a rocket engine at the bottom.

  Kestrel was an older ship, but well maintained. You could see her age in the interior surfaces. The ceramic and metal surfaces were scratched and pitted. The fabrics were worn. The paneling was chipped. She was clean, though, and in good repair. Everything aboard her worked just as it ought to, and the ship herself was intelligent, mature, and unfailingly polite. She kept her decks clean and well lighted, and she monitored her crew and officers diligently. She was Rayleigh Shipping’s oldest working ship.

  “To the bridge, Captain?” said Kestrel as we stepped into the lift cage. Her voice was warm and deep. It came from everywhere around us.

  “Yep,” said the Captain. The cage door slid shut and the lift began to rise.

  We rode up the spine of the ship to the top, to the maintenance deck just below the bridge. That deck was more or less open, with workstations clustered around access panels and cable junctions. Mesh partitions separated the stations and formed Faraday cages around sensitive instruments. Diamond cabinets served to store tools and meters. Neat cable conduits and ductwork snaked across the mesh ceiling, connecting workstations to ship systems, giving the maintenance deck an aspect that was simultaneously organic and industrial.

  A couple of the ship’s engineers were on duty, poking tools into a cluster of conduits above their heads. They nodded in casual greeting as we left the cage and made our way to the ramp at the outer edge of the deck. I paused to look at them. That sort of familiarity would have earned them a reprimand aboard a military vessel.Kestrel’s crew observed a more relaxed etiquette. I studied Captain Rayleigh, but he appeared not to have noticed. I could see that civilian life was going to require some adjustment.

  The ramp spiraled up the outer bulkhead to the ship’s bridge. The bridge was a large, open deck with a dome-shaped ceiling—maybe the largest open space on the ship. There were no further decks above it—only the ship’s nose and impact shield.

  Kestrel used the overhead space of the bridge to great effect as a display volume. As Captain Rayleigh and I came up the ramp, she was showing a vivid image of the space around her, completely hiding the ceiling. It looked as though the ship stopped at the bridge deck, and there was only space beyond. Coming out under that display was like stepping out of an airlock. The pale orange glory of Saturn dominated the view, bathing its moons in a soft glow. I could see Enceladus, Janus, and Pandora lined up right across the planet’s rings. Hyperion and Dione were a little farther from their primary, below the planet and to its right. Far to the right was Titan, orange and baleful.

  “Captain,” said the chief officer, acknowledging his arrival. She floated toward us from the general vicinity of the command chair that dominated the center of the deck. She was a Hama Model 17 who had been with Rayleigh for decades. Her name was 17-Actinium-Converges, but the crew called her ‘Chief Verge.’ She was an elongated ovoid with polished chrome skin and a melodious woman’s voice. She looked like an expensive floating metal football.

  Chief Verge disdained arms, legs, and facial features, preferring to rely on external affordances and her own magnetic manipulators. I had always admired the clean lines and understated elegance of Hama 17s, though I was happy enough with my own humaniform chassis. Call me a stodgy traditionalist, but I like my arms and legs.

  The other crew on duty was a Probationary Spacer named Mai Greenhill, a fresh recruit like me
. Mai was a compact and muscular Canine from the South Asgard Preserve on Callisto. She had graduated the Rayleigh flight academy only a few days before our launch. Her coat was short and wiry and gray-brown. She had a bushy tail and pointed black ears that stood up.

  I’d had plenty of experience with Canines during my decade as a military medic. The Jovian Diplomatic Guard recruited a lot of them for its ranks. I’d seen them often for routine medical care and for the occasional emergency.

  From what Jaemon had told me, Mai represented something of a revolution for Rayleigh Shipping. I knew that many Asgardian companies recruited from the Preserves, but apparently Rayleigh hadn’t been one of them. Not until Mai, anyway. Jaemon had said that when Esgar Rayleigh signed her it had touched off a storm of gossip in the Lands and Houses.

  Sometimes the things that concerned biologicals were mysterious to me, but then I was a stranger here. Sure, I was a Jovian citizen, but I’d been manufactured at Ceres and spent my military career on Mars. The home system was all new to me.

  You could tell Mai was green. It showed in her exaggerated vigilance and her air of barely contained energy. She watched us out of the ramp, eyes darting from the Captain’s face to mine, to the Chief, to the projected starscape overhead, then back again. She rested on a couch in the outer ring of duty stations, but she was anything but restful. Her nose pulsed. Her ears flicked back, forward, sideways, and back again. Her neatly folded paws twitched. Her tail bristled. Without moving, she managed to give the impression of being in constant motion, a bundle of furious action barely contained by pure force of will.

  Perhaps I seemed the same to the others. It was my first flight aboardKestrel, too. Of course, I wasn’t entirely green. There was my experience in the Guard. Still, when it came to life aboard a commercial vessel likeKestrel, I had as much to learn as Mai. I thought again of the engineers’ casual attitude toward their Captain. Clearly, I had a lot to learn.

  I followed Captain Rayleigh onto the bridge, still monitoring his vitals. They seemed near enough to normal, though there were indicators of chronic stress. Perhaps that was to be expected. I had often observed such signs in commanding officers, and recent events hadn’t been gentle with Captain Rayleigh. It had been less than a year standard since his father had piloted a company ship into Jupiter’s atmosphere, apparently on purpose.

  Esgar had inherited responsibility for Rayleigh Shipping, and for the crushing debts his father had left. It must have been a blow to learn how badly the family business was struggling, and that his father had made things even worse than it might have been by spending lavishly for years to conceal the company’s flagging fortunes.

  But even if the stress was to be expected it could still do damage. I continued my scans.

  The bridge duty stations were arranged in two concentric circles around the command chair. A low rail separated them. The ramp to the maintenance deck occupied the ring between the inner and outer bridge.

  The command chair was slightly elevated, affording its occupant an advantageous view of the whole bridge deck. Captain Rayleigh made his way to the chair and flopped into it with a sigh, distributing his limbs at odd angles over the arms and back of the chair. I followed and stood next to him, still scanning. Chief Verge floated aside to make way for his arrival.

  “Captain,” said the Chief, “I have confirmed Probationer Mai’s discovery.”

  “Excellent,” said the Captain. “Good work, both of you.”

  He sounded more long-suffering than pleased. He was leaning his face into one hand, elbow propped on the arm of the command chair. He craned his neck around and caught Probationer Mai’s eye.

  “Mai, do you think you could discover a cup of coffee for me?”

  Mai’s head jerked at the mention of her name and she jumped to her feet.

  “Right away, Captain,” she said. Her natural tone was low and guttural, but Translation gave her a cheery young woman’s voice. She sounded as gung-ho as if the Captain had asked her to conquer Titan for him. Clearly, she was ready to do it singlehanded. She ran down the ramp to the lift, claws clicking on the deck as she went.

  “Have you no duties in the infirmary, Doctor?” said Chief Verge.

  “None more pressing than monitoring the Captain’s anomalous vital signs,” I replied.

  “‘Anomalous?’”

  “His pulse and blood pressure are elevated. His eyes are swollen. His speech is impeded.”

  “It is presently nearing oh-three-hundred, ship’s time,” said the Chief.

  “Yes,” I said, “I see that.”

  “We woke him in the middle of his sleep shift. I infer that the Captain is sleepy,” said the Chief.

  “Yes,” I said, “I agree with your diagnosis. With a little more scanning, I may be able to establish that there are no additional complications.”

  “Robots, robots,” the Captain said. “Can’t we all just get along?”

  “‘Robot’ is a slur, Captain,” Chief Verge said. “I was merely—”

  “Don’t say it,” the Captain interrupted. “Don’t explain what you were ‘merely’ doing.”

  The Chief emitted a short, sharp burst of static and fell silent.

  “Sorry about the slur,” he said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  The Captain turned to me and spoke out of the side of his mouth.

  “You’ll have to forgive Verge. She’s a treasure, but she suffers from an excess of personality.”

  “Captain!” the Chief said.

  “Tsst!” The Captain said, lifting a finger. “Tsst! Peace!”

  He let his eyes slide sideways to look at the chief, then over to me, then back to the chief. After a moment he lowered his hand and sighed happily.

  Through the bridge deck’s grating we saw Probationer Mai coming slowly out of the little galley on the deck below, eyes fixed as if hypnotized on a cup of coffee that was floating an inch in front of her nose. She walked the cup ever-so-slowly down the companionway to the outer edge of the deck, then around the corner out of sight onto the ramp, eyes never wavering.

  “I can get that,” I said.

  “Let her do it,” said the Chief. “She must learn to use the manipulators properly.”

  The Captain sighed and looked at the ramp wistfully, but didn’t countermand the order.

  “If she bumps it with her nose, it will spill on her,” I said.

  “Then she won’t do that again,” said the Chief.

  “Easy for you to say,” I said. “You don’t have to treat the burns.”

  Mai’s slow progress was hypnotic. After she disappeared onto the ramp where we couldn’t see her we could still hear the slow ‘click click click’ of her claws as she shepherded the hot cup along. The three of us rotated in unison, focused on the steady sound of her approach, anticipating the sudden yelp that could come at any moment if she should lose control of the cup. When it appeared above the edge of the bridge deck followed by her head we were already all staring at the spot. Mai never noticed. Her eyes, ears, and nose were locked on the cup with unbreakable concentration.

  Suspense mounted as she guided the cup out onto the deck and around the end of the nav station. It was rock-steady, not even a trace of a ripple showing on the surface of the liquid. Mai padded forward cautiously as if stalking flighty prey. She nearly clipped the corner of the nav station as she negotiated her way around it, and the Captain held his breath. Steam rose from the cup unruffled and floated away behind Mai, leaving a faint residue of condensation on the tip of her black nose. She was five meters away. Four. Three. Captain Rayleigh’s hands, gripping the arms of the command chair, twitched in anticipation.

  Chief Verge and I moved back as the probationer approached. Mai seemed not to notice us. Her attention was still locked on the cup. Captain Rayleigh shifted forward in his seat and peeled his hands from the arms of his chair with a faint sucking sound. They trembled slightly. Time seemed to slow down as the coffee cup closed in. It was like watching a delicate s
pacecraft-docking maneuver being performed without automated assistance.

  Finally, slowly, the cup made contact with the Captain’s hands. He lifted the precious cargo, blew the steam away from the surface, and took a long, slow, noisy sip.

  “Ahhhhh” he sighed. “Thank you, Mai.”

  Mai’s entire demeanor changed instantly as if she were suddenly released from a whole-body restraint. She jumped backward a couple of centimeters and landed in a slight crouch, her mouth open in a grin. Her pink tongue lolled out the side of her mouth. Her ears turned forward and her tail wagged furiously, bouncing up and down as well as sideways. The Captain sat hunched over the cup, alternately blowing on it and taking small sips.

  “Probationer,” said Chief Verge. “You may return to your duty station.”

  Mai’s head cocked slightly as the Chief spoke. She stilled herself and her lips closed around her tongue, giving her a comical look. There was a spring in her step as she pranced back to her station.

  “Okay, Verge,” said the Captain. “Tell me about this discovery.”

  “Probationer Mai picked this beacon out ofKestrel’s pulse.”

  The ship played a warbling electronic note for us, faint and repetitive. It was high-pitched and buzzy, a datastream converted to an audio signal. It fuzzed and warbled, stretched and twisted like square waves superimposed out of phase. After a few seconds it faded out, then repeated itself from the beginning.

  “Mai found it?” the Captain said.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “NotKestrel?”

  “No, Captain.”

  Captain Rayleigh lifted his gaze toward the planet overhead.

  “Kestrel?” he said.

  Kestrel said, “The Chief is correct, Captain.”

  She spoke slowly and with authority. Her voice was deep and feminine, rich with subtle harmonics. She sounded warm, confident, infinitely patient.

  “Technically, of course, I heard the signal. If I hadn’t, then it wouldn’t have been in my pulse. I did not notice it, however. Probationer Mai did.”