The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency #1)(51)

“Well, you really are Kristian Jansen, and you don’t have any outstanding warrants or debts, your guild union dues are paid up, and your personnel ratings are good,” the crew member said. “Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you, uh…”

“Ndan. Petty Officer Gtan Ndan.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“You’re welcome, crewman.” Ndan looked at Marce’s rucksack. “You’re traveling light.”

“My other bag got boosted.”

Ndan nodded. “Sucks. When you get squared away go to the quartermaster and get new kit. You’ll be charged extortionate rates but that’s your problem. You got marks?”

“A few.”

“If you’re short, come find me. I can lend.”

“That’s very kind.”

“No it’s not. It’s business. My interest rates are also extortionate.” Ndan pointed out of the lobby to a bus waiting outside. “Get on that. We leave in about five minutes. Do you still need a head?”

It took a second for it to register that Ndan was talking about a bathroom. “I’m fine.”

“Off you go, then.” She turned to see who else she needed to process.

It took five seconds for Marce to get from the lobby door to the bus and he felt exposed the entire way. But he managed to get on the bus without incident, find a seat, and wait. He looked up through the window at the House of Lagos building and wondered if Vrenna was looking down. He felt briefly sorry for Ghreni Nohamapetan, whom Vrenna was likely to thump the crap out of sometime soon. Then in the distance there was a brief thump that sounded like a shell hitting a building, and Marce remembered there were other things Vrenna and their father might still have to worry about first.

From the bus to the port he went, through another paper check and thumb scan at imperial customs, then up the beanstalk, which was disappointing to Marce because there were no windows and the video screen in the cramped passenger cabin showed nothing but informational customs videos and ads.

At a certain point in the trip up the beanstalk, Marce was aware that his (fake) hair felt like it was being pressed down onto his scalp. He mentioned this to his seatmate, who nodded but didn’t look up from whatever he was reading on his tablet. “Push field,” he said, then went back to his reading.

Marce nodded to himself. Push fields were humanity’s best approximation for artificial gravity, in which objects were pushed on from “above”—whatever “above” was in any particular scenario—rather than pulled on from below, as gravity was generally understood to work. The physics of push fields were discovered accidentally. Researchers back on Earth had tried to work out the problem of shaping a small bubble of local space-time around a starship in order to take advantage of the then newly discovered Flow, and ended up taking a lot of side detours in the math. Most of these detours offered nothing of any benefit, but one of them did, and it was pressing on Marce’s hair.

Marce looked up and found the push field generator tubes, running down the length of the passenger compartment like fluorescent lighting. He of course understood the physics of the push field, since it was a consonant subset of the Flow physics. But he’d never been off End. He’d never experienced one. As he was experiencing it now, he found it slightly unsettling. He didn’t like what basically felt like a giant hand pressing down on his head and shoulders, and he didn’t like how it made his fake hair lay on his scalp. He looked around the compartment and noted there was a reason why most of the experienced crew kept their hair either very short or in tightly wrapped braids and queues.

From the beanstalk now to Imperial Station, which featured a rotating ring section for the marines and imperial staff who stayed at the station long term, and a separate merchant section managed by push fields, where visiting ships unloaded and managed their cargo. Marce and the other crew got out in the merchant area, and he immediately understood why long-term residents would prefer to live in the ring. The push fields here, set to a standard G, were almost intolerably pushy.

As Marce and the rest of the crew were led to the crew muster area for the Yes, Sir, he saw a collection of people in the cargo hold, waiting. Those would be the Yes, Sir’s passengers, he knew, with whom he would have been, if Ghreni Nohamapetan hadn’t kidnapped him and marked him. The passengers certainly didn’t look like refugees. They looked like what they were—wealthy people. They were milling with their children and their stacks of cargo at a thousand marks a kilo as if they were about to have an adventure, rather than flee a planet forever.

Despite the fact that he fully intended to be one of them, Marce managed to feel resentment toward them, toward the people who could, in fact, leave their problems behind through the simple application of money.

Well, you’re a hypocrite, his brain told him. Well, maybe he was. But then again he wasn’t leaving to escape. He was leaving because someone needed to tell the emperox, and then explain to the parliament and everyone else, how the end was coming. That person just happened to be Marce.

Nope, still a hypocrite, his brain said. Then they were out of the cargo area and into a tunnel, funneling them toward the muster area and a shuttle.

A final check of papers and thumbprint and the shuttle detached from Imperial Station to the Yes, Sir. Again there were no windows—windows were a positive hazard in the blank vacuum of space—but this time Marce could access a camera feed from his tablet. He did so and saw the Yes, Sir hone into view, a long tube with two rotating rings, an ungainly but strangely beautiful object. His home for the next nine months.