Halcyon Drift by Brian M. Stableford

Author:Brian M. Stableford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, space opera, adventure, starship, interplanetary
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The next morning I slept.

During the afternoon, delArco had to go see Charlot to collate some information and try to establish a sensible basis for our attempt on the Lost Star. Johnny and Rothgar were refluxing the drive, but I had nothing at all to do—there was no point in trying to make up some sort of excuse for a flight plan. You can’t make plans to deal with the likes of the Halcyon Drift.

I took the opportunity to relax for a while—it was the last chance I’d get for a week or more. In the evening, I met Eve for a drink in the port’s showpiece—a high tower with a bubble of glass set on top from which tourists could get a great view of the Drift. You also got a great view of the squalid area back of the central port where the locals conducted whatever trivial business had brought them to the rim. Much more to my liking was the vast expanse of the spacefield which stretched for ten or twelve miles away to the south, ribboned with truckways and pockmarked with private hangars and bay gantries. The Hooded Swan was a long way off, closeted by high fencing and protected by booms slung across the approaches. But she was a tall ship, and I knew her well enough to visualise her lines and compare her to the ranks of ramrods, dirt-trackers and p-shifters which were parked closer to the tower. The other mass-relaxers dwarfed her with their massive, six- or eight-shielded hulls, but they were just big and ugly. She was more or less of a size with the lighter p-shifters and the bigger yachts, and she looked a little uncomfortable compared to their silky, polished skins. But I knew how frail and false that mirror-brightness was.

I let my eyes dwell on the alien ships, all shapes and sizes of them, which were scattered all over the tarpol. They were mostly the dimensional hoppers of free traders, but there were a few dead slow dredgers which made their living on extended jaunts into the quieter parts of the Drift, trawling the sleeping dust-clouds and sorting out anything of any value—ore, organics, gemstones, anamorphosed matter. They wholesaled their collections maybe twice a year on Hallsthammer. It wasn’t much of a living, considering the dangers inherent in the Drift work, but it kept the ships flying and the crews fed. A lot of spacers asked a little more than that, though humans as a rule are either too ambitious or too quarrelsome. We are basically a vain and aggressive people.

I searched briefly for Alachakh’s Hymnia, but remembered that he now used the name on a different ship, and that I wouldn’t recognise her.

Eve looked at the sky, not at the ships. Her fascinated stare betrayed the fact that she hadn’t been in space more than a few days. Even casual tourists are careful to lose the open expression of cosmic astonishment as soon as they can. Nobody likes to be labelled a dirt-grubber in a galactic age.

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