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My only regret is she isn't coming with us-but she's got the best excuse I can think of."
Six months of pregnancy, now showing considerably. She put her hand on her stomach and met his eyes.
"Yeah, Armstrong, but when's yours due?" Sven Nyqvist said, poking a stubby finger into his captain's midriff. Steven Armstrong's booming voice led the laughter.
"Thank Christ that's over," he muttered, standing beside the wheel of the Alicia. Dockside was a kilometer to the west now, Sparta City a sprawl of white and pastel and greenery across its hills. And the dockside crowds, and the reporters.
The Capital Herald's little newsblimp was still overhead, with the irritating buzz of its twin engines; he was strongly tempted to give it the finger. No. The cameras could count the hairs in your nose from 800 meters. Too many watching, he thought. Ignore them.
As he'd ignored the reporters with their asinine questions. "Why do you want to enslave the transportees, Senator Armstrong?"
"Assholes."
"Sir?" from the helmsman.
"Steady as she goes. Just glad to get out of town. If I never see another equals sign, it'll be too soon."
"Amen," said the helmsman.
Enslave the transportees, Armstrong thought disgustedly. Sweet Christ, I married a transportee, didn't I?
Many of his best workers were transportees, and he had sponsored a half-dozen into the Brotherhood of Poseidon after helping them make Citizen. Even the common ruck of them weren't too bad, once they learned they couldn't sit in the gutter and live on handouts here. He snorted again; anyone who starved on Sparta deserved it; you could eat for a week on two day's wages for casual labor. Hell, you can walk out of town and throw rocks at the rabbits. He'd done that himself as a boy, when times were really hard.
No, it was the real scum that needed attention. Not those scooped up by BuReloc for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, like Alicia's parents; the real criminals, the pimps and street-gangers and whores. Bad enough they cut each other up down in Minetown, dropped their bastards in the gutters without even caring enough to take them to the nuns. Now they were swarming into that son-of-a-bitch Croser's NCLF, outnumbering the real workingmen in the Dockworkers' and half a dozen other unions.
Strikes-only last month he'd lost fifteen tons of rockcrawler while they struck the packing-plant over some idiot political thing. Killings, like that mess at the Spartosky. Thank God Alicia hadn't been there.
"Aaah, enough politics," he muttered.
He pushed the captain's cap back on his head and worked the cigar to the corner of his mouth. One of cookie's stewards brought him a cup of coffee the way he liked it, black and sweet, and he cupped his hands around the thick white china. The Alicia was making good speed, seven knots; not wise to go much faster. Constitution Bay had enough sandbars and shallow water to give a strong man the willies.
She would do better out in the open ocean, though. He looked around with pride: fifteen hundred tons, good von Alderheim steel for the hull, decking and upperworks of redwood. Two thousand-horsepower diesels with electric transmission, burbling their song of power through his feet. Deck-winches, nets, processing-holds and bunkrooms, all the best that Sparta City could make, and that was damned good.
Even off-planet electronics, echo-sounder and radar.
The horseshoe bridge with its consoles and dials smelled of paint and seasoned wood and very slightly of the vegetable-oil fuel burned by the engines; he liked it, would like it even better when she'd been battered a little by the ocean swells, and smelled of salt and piscoid. The shallow Aegean and Oinos swarmed with good eating-fish, far more than Sparta's limited population could use. The Alicia was bound for bigger game: the huge piscoids of the cold and dangerous Thule Sea; that was what the rocket-harpoon launcher was for. Lustrous metallic-scaled hide, mouth-ivory more beautiful than the vanished elephant herds of Earth. Complex oils with a dozen uses, from perfumes to drugs. "Sir."
He jerked out of his reverie, looked around: It was the radio watch, Maureen Terwonsky. Looking worried, which was not like her.
"It's a radiotelephone call, sir. They want to speak to you personally. They won't give a name." He pulled the cigar out of his mouth and considered the chewed wet end. "If it's those news people again, tell them to go bugger themselves," he said. She began to speak into her equipment. "Captain… Captain Armstrong, he says if you don't listen you'll regret it, and your family will too." Something cold and limp touched his spine. He leaned forward quickly, touching the control that shut off the speaker for a moment.
"Get to the auxiliary in the radio room, and get the Milice on the line. Move!"
He took up the handset with a deep breath. "This is Captain Armstrong," he said; his voice was deadly flat with the effort of control. "Who is this?"
"This is the voice of the workers, Captain Armstrong," the voice said. "This is the voice of the ones you think are tools to be used and thrown aside to make your riches."
This can't be serious, he thought. A crank call; the voice sounded a little nasal, probably North American. Not a slum dialect; educated, but not Spartan-born either.
"What the hell are you talking about?" he asked, playing for time. With a little luck, the Milice would trace the call back through Broadcast Central. "You can't-"
"Oh, but we can, Captain. Hear the voice of the tool. We've heard your voice, making speeches. Trying to grind the common people down, make them suffer even more. Now you're going to feel our anger, now you're going to suffer from the just wrath of the people."
"What the fuck-" Static hiss; Terwonsky stuck her head through the hatch at the rear of the bridge. "Milice got it, they're working on it, Cap," she said. "Don't worry, probably just a crank-" he began.
The Alicia jerked and stopped dead in the water, almost as if she had hit a shoal. Echoing silence fell as the engines cut out, broken only by yells from startled crewfolk. Lights flickered, then came on more dimly as the emergency batteries cut in. Armstrong lunged across the bridge, balance telling him the ship was already down by the stern and to starboard. His hand slapped down on the communicator, and a screen lit with a view of the engine room.
Armstrong's stomach clenched, and he could feel his scrotum contract and try to draw his testicles up against his stomach. Nothing lit the engine compartment but the red emergency lights, and they shone on a scene out of hell. Water plumed in through the floor gratings, from a slashing cut that must run the full length of the compartment; no, beyond it, into the rear hold. The deck was already awash. The engineering crew were scrambling around the main hatchway in the bulkhead just below the pickup, battering and prying with crowbars and hand-tools.
"Sven!" Armstrong shouted. "What's going on?"
A desperate face turned up, blood and water ru
"Hold on!" He slammed the all-stations button, and his amplified voice bellowed out throughout the Alicia.
"Now hear this! The black gang is trapped in the engine-room, and it's flooding. McLaren, whoever's near there, gut the cutting lance down there now, d'you hear. Now!"
"Jesus, Steve, it's flooding faster, we can't budge this bastard." Panting, and an iron chung as a prybar broke under the desperate heaving of three strong men. Some of the others were shouldering in to try with their bare hands, screaming in panic.