Angel Station
Table of Contents
ANGEL STATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
Excerpt from Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams
Books By Walter Jon Williams
ANGEL STATION
WALTER JON WILLIAMS
BOOKS BY WALTER JON WILLIAMS
Novels
Hardwired
Knight Moves
Voice of the Whirlwind
Days of Atonement
Aristoi
Metropolitan
City on Fire
Ambassador of Progress
Angel Station
The Rift (as Walter J Williams)
Implied Spaces
Divertimenti
The Crown Jewels
House of Shards
Rock of Ages
Dread Empire's Fall
The Praxis
The Sundering
Conventions of War
Dagmar
This Is Not a Game
Deep State
The Fourth Wall
Collections
Facets
Frankensteins & Foreign Devils
The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories
Thanks to Kathleen Hedges for help in formatting this edition.
Thanks to Tim Hocutt and Mark Probert for aid in producing a legible scan.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
ANGEL STATION
Copyright (c) 1989, 2011 by Walter Jon Williams
Smashwords edition published by Walter Jon Williams
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
CHAPTER 1
When their father killed himself he recorded the event, just as he recorded everything else of importance in his sad, ill-organized life. “I know what’s coming,” he said. “I know I can’t stop it. Can’t change. I’m sorry.”
When it happened Runaway was in deep space, drifting between singularity shots. Pasco, their father, hung in the air, weightless, in the computer compartment. Fat, ineffectual, his long grey hair and beard floating out around him, he looked like a weeping Father Christmas. Behind him, outside monitors showed a random, slowly rotating field of stars.
“We can’t survive,” he said. “Not the way we’re going.” He swallowed, hard. His hands were shaking as they drifted weightlessly by his sides. He was surrounded by his junk: old computer consoles, malfunctioning holo cameras, tangles of optic wire, battered microscopes, microsurgery and gene-splicing equipment, an old autowomb. All the stuff he’d gathered over the years, gathered as part of a superstition almost, as if all the little bits of equipment, the programs he’d stitched together and run, the sperm and ova he’d tinkered with, the incessant recordings of himself that he’d made, hours on hours, would somehow add up to a whole, would re-create the universe in a way that made sense to him. Would magic him away from the slow death which he, his children, his ship, were facing.
“I’m not adaptable enough,” he said. “Look. I’ve made you smart. You’re fast. Maybe you can figure a way out of this. I’d just be in your way.” A fastlearn cartridge, unnoticed, hung by his foot, making slow-motion pirouettes in the whispering stream of recirculated air.
“If I stay around, I’ll fail.” He shook his shaggy head. “I’ll go down, and you’ll just go down with me. I’m not strong enough. Not any more.” He was drifting closer to the camera now. His children could see the pouched eyes, the broken veins on his nose and cheeks, the saliva that clung to his lower lip. Eyes that were dilated and mad. A stream of red pills, unnoticed, was trailing out of a pocket, spinning into the compartment like drops of blood. “I’m going to get out of your way. An overdose. It won’t hurt. Kick my bod out the airlock when I’m gone.” He began to cry. “Take care of Kitten,” he wept. “I know she loves me.”
His children waited for him to say more but he just hung there, crying. His massive, rounded shoulders shook as he rotated slowly. His tears hovered in the compartment like jewels. One of the teardrops drifted to the camera lens and adhered to it, refracting motion, colors, a smear of bleeding madness. Their father gasped. “I’m sorry,” he said again, his voice a husky whisper, and around the splatter on the lens they could see him reaching for the camera to shut it off.
The screen went black. Ubu reached for the controls with his upper left hand, hesitated, looked at his sister. “You want to see it again?” he asked.
She looked at him with her wide, deep-space eyes. She stroked the white cat in her lap without looking at him. The cat’s purr seemed louder than her voice. “Erase it,” she said.
Ubu hesitated for a moment, his finger hovering above the Erase button. He wanted the message to contain something worth remembering, some knowledge that would be of use, a final dying piece of wisdom that would help put his father into place, into some synthesis in which his life, their lives, his dying could all be understood.
There was nothing. Nothing but the final sad crumbling of a mind run out of choices and no longer sane, backed into a corner it couldn’t see a way out of. That and the inane request about Kitten. Ubu understood this. But his longing made him hesitate.
There was an ache in his throat. He pressed the button. The little electric memory died without resistance, without a sound. The ache didn’t fade.
Beautiful Maria looked at him. “It wasn’t unexpected,” she said. She chewed a lip. “We knew he wouldn’t last. That...something... was going to happen with him.” She stood, gathered Maxim’s four dangling limbs. Her long blue-black hair fell forward, shrouded her face. “I’m going to my compartment,” she said.
Ubu was still staring at the screen, his brows knit. Wanting the wisdom to come. He turned to his sister.
“Do you want company?”
She shook her head. “Later, maybe.”
“Shall I call you? When I... put him out?”
Beautiful Maria’s hair shimmered like dark rain. “Yes. Please.”
Ubu watched as she slipped out of the command cage. Then he turned back to the comm board again.
A distant shudder came up from the floor, up the chair’s single metal pillar, through Ubu’s spine. A little misalignment in the ship’s centrifuge, the huge bearings burning slowly, metal being shorn away slice by slice. Not critical, not yet. There were years to go before he’d have to really worry about it.
The fuge droned around him. He’d have to fire his father out the airlock before the next singularity shoot.
He stood and walked to his cabin, a humming metal shell on the second level of the fuge. The walls and ceiling were covered, every inch, with pictures he’d pasted up. Holo star charts that brought constellations to within an inch of his nose, pictures of nebulae, of black holes, of ships. People suited for vacuum, combat, exploration. Phil Mendoza looking gallant; Michiko Tanaka holding a sizer guitar in one hand, a pistol in the other. Hype-people with painted eyes and lips like drops of bloody dew, gazing into the distance with unreachable longing. Alien creatures imagined or real. Pictures of death, of faceplates spattered with blood, of eyes gazing out in horror. Pictures of his father.
Ubu sat on his rack and stared up at the ceiling, at the chaos of fading plastic, the images that had once had meaning for him and that now seemed pointless, a ridiculous, childish display of fantasy and longing, no longer a mirror of his mind.
Suddenly his father was by him, sitting in a chair in the center of the compartment. Pasco was younger, his hair and beard neatly trimmed. Confident, fit. Like the father in the pictures Ubu had pasted to the ceiling.
“Is something bothering you, son?” his father asked. “Is there anything I can help you with?”
Ubu looked at his father and narrowed his eyes. “Get lost, Pop,” he said. “You killed yourself, asshole.”
Pasco looked at him sadly for a moment. “I just wanted you to know that I’ll be around,” he said.
“Fuck that.” Ubu reached for the control panel and turned off the holo display. His father vanished. So did his chair.
Ubu’s skin felt hot. He stood on his rack and began tearing at the pictures on the ceiling. They were glued on thoroughly and he scarred them white with the tracks of his fingernails. A rain of plastic fell, a drifting snow of curling white foam. Sobs tried to break out of his chest. With difficulty he kept them down.
At the end he stood amid piles of ruined chaff. Captain of the Runaway, he thought. Maria didn’t want the job; it was his by default. Bossrider. Singularity shooter numero uno. Captain of all I survey.
Quietly, he began to laugh.
“I have a plan,” he said.
*
Beautiful Maria looked up at him, seeing his pale skin and fair hair spattered with flecks of foam. She and Ubu were i
n computer central, the brass nozzles and long black tubes of tempafoam sprayers in their hands. Two months after their father’s death, they had finally nerved themselves to deal with his belongings. They collected all the rubble, lashed it together, covered it with tempafoam until they could sell it for spare parts at Ascención, their next port of call. Probably the only thing that would bring money would be all the cameras that Pasco had set up throughout the ship to record his activities.
Maria hooked a stray strand of hair behind one ear. The rest of her black river of hair had been tied back until they returned to the fuge’s gravity.
“What plan?” she said.
Ubu grinned. “You know Dig Angel? The Long Reach subsidiary? They’ve got an open advert on the Ascención Station board wanting contracts for Kanto-compatible miners and comps for their new operation in Angelica.”
“Be wanting to shoot for whoever’s gonna pick up the contract?”
“Better than that, Maria. Better.”
Beautiful Maria rotated gently in midair, hooked one hand around a padded castoff bar on the command cage, then caught the battered old autowomb with her nimble feet. She drew it close, then let go of the bar and rotated, using the tension on the tempafoam hose as a pivot point. She pressed the trigger. The turbines of the portable compressor whined and foam spattered the clear plastic womb where Maria’s heart had taken its first beat, where her developing eyes first turned away from the light.
Burying my past in foam, she thought. A distant sense of loss hummed in her mind. This wasn’t just Pasco’s gear, this was a part of her life as well. Artifacts of her existence were disappearing, smothering in layers of foam, dying.
“We pick up the contract ourselves,” Ubu said. His voice was insistent. “We get a loan, buy the miners from the Kanto rep, deliver them in our own holds. Our profit be increased at least a hundred percent.”
Beads of foam swelled over the womb’s control panel. Maria blinked bits of the stuff from her eyes. “Why isn’t Long Reach supplying their own operation?”
“Be too successful, that’s why. I checked the price of Long Reach stock. They’re expanding so far ahead of their programmed growth that they’re running short of supplies out here on the Edge.”
“It’s still funny.” Maria wiped sweat from her forehead. She looked at Ubu thoughtfully. “And who’s gonna give us a loan, anyway?”
“OttoBanque.”
“OttoBanque.” She repeated the word slowly, knowing what Ubu wanted. A new tension rose in her body, armored her against Ubu’s idea.
He looked at her defiantly. “We’ve got the miners for collateral. And the contract’s just sitting there.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Look at the figures.”
She looked away. She didn’t want to think about it. “What if it goes wrong?”
“What if it goes right?” He kicked off from the black padded shutters that they’d closed over the computer readouts while they were playing with the foam, came to her, took her shoulders in his upper set of hands.
Maria’s knuckles were white as they clutched the hose and sprayer. “I don’t know if I want to do this.”
“Let me show you the figures.”
She shook her head. A river of sorrow opened in her heart. Are we really this desperate? she thought. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll look.”
“You may not have to. They may give us the loan anyway.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Not believing it.
Knowing she couldn’t resist much longer.
*
“Words?” Ubu looked at his sister.
Her eyes reflected the light of the monitor, a cold gray glaze, like the glaze in Pasco’s eyes when Ubu had reached out to close them. She raised a hand to her throat. “He was old,” she said. “He tried hard and couldn’t make it. We didn’t know how to help him. He died.” She shrugged. “I can’t think of anything else.”
A good father? Ubu wanted to ask. He made us out of frozen sperm and ova that he’d bought somewhere, stitched together in a secondhand splicer he’d bought as junk. No genes in common, neither with ourselves nor Pasco, not a real brother and sister and father, just people living together. Gave us talents we’re not sure we know how to use. Jacked our growth with hormone boosters and fastlearn cartridges, machine maturity to go with prematurely adult bodies. He thought we had something to give him, something he was desperate for. We were looking to him for answers, and all the time it was Pasco who wanted the answers from us.
Ubu looked at the monitor, the heavy body zipped into its plastic tote bag. Good father or not, now a dead thing.
Ubu had put Pasco in an airlock, not in the trash ejector, wanting him to go like a person and not a piece of garbage. He touched the ship systems board, gave it an order. The hardwired safety codes tagged off alarms, red lights. Ubu overrode them. The lock door blew open, and in a blurred instant Pasco was gone, a plastic-wrapped projectile falling down a long cold curve toward galactic center. A harsh metallic alarm was his last epitaph. Ubu closed the lock and the alarm faded. Red lights changed to green. Tears fell down Beautiful Maria’s cheeks. She stood and turned away.
“I want to take us through the next shoot,” she said. Ubu could barely hear her soft voice. “Okay?”
“If you want.”
“I’ll set it up in the computer. I’ll let you know when it’s time.” She walked away. She was naked, the way they often were in the ship, and Ubu watched the way her long hair molded itself to the curve of her spine, a river of black contrasting with the warm milk-white skin. Warmth fluttered in his nerves, his stomach.
Why do I care more about that than Pasco? he wondered. Does it matter that I don’t care more than I do?
Ubu stared at the monitor for a moment, the gray flickering image of the empty airlock. He stood up, left the control cage, pulled open the door of a maintenance locker.
Time to deal with Kitten.
*
Two months after picking up the Dig Angel contract, Runaway whiteholed out of the Now within a few thousand kilometers of optimal, a week out of Angelica Station. After their radio signal reached the station and returned, Ubu discovered they were in trouble.
He sat bolt upright and looked at the newsfax coming in. Maxim, disturbed, leaped from his lap. “Dig Angel,” he said. “Gone under. Long Reach crashed.”
“We had a contract,” Beautiful Maria said. Her voice was jagged with the aftereffects of the singularity shoot, the pulse of the Now. The dreamy quality of it sent a pale blue color into Ubu’s head, contrasting with his own blazing frustration.
Ubu clenched his teeth. Anger poured up his spine. This was all his fault.
He cast a look at Beautiful Maria. She wasn’t looking at him, didn’t want to say I told you so.
“Well be on the tail end of a long list of creditors,” Ubu said. “We won’t get our money in years.”
“Another buyer?”
“No other small companies in this system. We’re way the hell out on the Edge—there’s only one big city on the planet, and the rest is mining in the asteroids. We’ll have to sell to a speculator. Maybe a rep from another mining company in another system, if we can find one.”
Ubu glared at the newsfax and ran sums in his head. “If we can get docking charges and transport, we can be happy.”
Beautiful Maria licked her lips as if trying to taste their options. “Maybe we can pick up a cargo to tide us over. Drugs or something, that doesn’t take up space in the cargo bay.”
“Better than dying right in Angelica.” He began flicking through the newsfax. “Let’s see who’s buying.” He felt sweat trickling down his nape. Data flickered on the screen. There had to be a buyer somewhere onstation. Had to be.
If there wasn’t, Angelica was the end.
The sound of finger exercises came from the upper lounge. Beautiful Maria was warming up on her sizer keyboard. Ubu walked along the smooth green centrifuge carpet and opened the screen. Maria looked up.
*
“Do you remember Cole Redwing?” Ubu said.
“Vaguely. He was on the Roland, yes?” Her fingers moved precisely over the keys.