All data was routed to him through plugs, but, like his uncle before him, he liked to use his eyes. He liked to watch a vessel in berth, and fret that it was taking too long to unload and clear so that another could take its position and pay a tariff of its own, just as he liked to complain when a slipway remained vacant for more than a day or two. He knew the tugs and lighters by sight, and the flitting cargo-servitors by their paint jobs and codes, and he could identify a pilot boat simply by the style and accomplishment of its attitude manoeuvres.
Above all, he enjoyed the view: from the office, straight down through the glass floor, through the thicket of girderwork and fuelling lines, through the scudding dots that were tugs and handlers, through the open structures and hard shadows of the giant slipways, and the radiation-scorched hulls of the vast ships that sat in them, down through it all into the brilliance of sunlight on slowly-tracking clouds, and the pinsharp clarity of the bright air, and the one hundred and forty-kilometre drop to the blue and grey and brown of Balhaut turning slowly below.
That particular day, the Gemminger Beroff Wakeshift was occupying the fourth slip, the Superluminal Grandee Ulysses the fifth, and the Pride of Tarnagua was beginning its pilot sequence to enter the eighth. The Relativistic Iterations of Hans Feingolt, line-lashed into slip seven, had developed an ignition fault that E. F. Montvelt had been told would delay its departure for a minimum of a week. He had already calculated the penalty tariff. The Eleksander Great Soljor was due to make shift in less than an hour, provided the charter agents could agree on the demurrage. In slip two, the Solace, just arrived, was beginning to discharge its cargo.
E. F. Montvelt hadn’t seen the Solace for two years. It was Plackett’s boat, and Plackett was known for long trailward runs down through Khulan and the Bethan Halo. However, the docket passed to him by the assistant rubricator told E. F. Montvelt that the Solace was eight months out of San Velabo, and had come to them from spinward. Plackett had changed his habits. E. F. Montvelt decided he would ask the shipmaster about it when he came on shore. E. F. Montvelt made a point of greeting each master in person. It was an old-fashioned courtesy that his uncle had taught him.
He already suspected the answer Plackett would give him. War changes fortunes and the contours of trade. The crusade had reopened much of the Khan Group and other spinward territories. Plackett had gone where the business was.
Except it wasn’t Plackett. E. F. Montvelt looked at the docket again. The Solace had changed hands. The name of her new owner was written up as Jonas.
‘Jonas,’ he read. Several of his clerks raised their heads from their work.
‘You spoke, sir?’ one called out.
E. F. Montvelt looked up at the junior man.
‘Jonas,’ he repeated. ‘Docket gives the name of the Solace’s master as Jonas.’
‘Which matters because?’
‘Jonas!’ snapped E. F. Montvelt. ‘You know? As in Jonas?’
‘I don’t catch the significance, sir,’ admitted the clerk.
They were all young idiots these days, E. F. Montvelt often reminded himself, too young. None of them knew the traditions. In his uncle’s day, everybody had known the name Jonas. It was a joke name, a makeweight. You wrote it on the docket as a placeholder when you didn’t know the master’s actual name. Sometimes rogue traders would even run under the name to conceal their identity or divert attention away from an affreightment scam.
‘Jonas!’ E. F. Montvelt repeated. ‘As in, Devil Jonas!’
‘Oh,’ nodded the junior, ‘like in the children’s story? What was it he had again? A box, was it?’
‘A locker,’ E. F. Montvelt sighed.
‘That’s it, a locker,’ the junior laughed, ‘far away in the depths of space, where he kept the souls of poor, shipwrecked wayfarers.’
The junior chuckled at the notion, and shook his head.
E. F. Montvelt went down to slipway two himself.
He made his way through the crowds thronging the quay. Crew and passengers were flooding off the ship, and all kinds of humanity had come to greet it. There were the slipway crews, the excise men in their bicorn hats, the inspectors from the Interior Guard, vittalers, itinerant peddlers, porters, hucksters; grifters offering guided tours of the battlefields, luxurious accommodations or surface transfers; scalpers selling permits and ask-no-questions paperwork; and commercial men and private citizens, who had come up to Highstation to greet the ship. E. F. Montvelt shoved his way through the bustle. He could smell armpits and foul breath, the garlic sweat of meat patties on a stove cart, the burnt sugar of a candy vendor, the ozone coming in off the pier’s atmospheric pressure fields and, behind all other odours, the oddly soapy, rancid fug that hung upon a slipway when a ship exhaled the recycled air that had been wheezing through its oxygen scrubbers for eight months.
Servitors chugged past him, hauling trains of crates. A tug boat whickered by overhead, its running lights flashing. The Solace, a juggernaut of pitted rust and seared void plating, sat up tall in the slip. Service crews were already at work, scaling her carbonised flanks like mountaineers on a rockface. E. F. Montvelt heard the tunk-tunk of magnetised footsteps as servitors crossed the hull perpendicular to him. He leaned over the rail, down into the shadow of the slipway drop. He saw the airgates extended and connected, and the firework sputter of welding teams. Below the gloom of the slip’s shadow, the dazzling white clouds of Balhaut crawled past.
E. F. Montvelt opened his data-slate and took another look at the ship’s paperwork. The Solace, it came as no surprise, was bearing the dead. Amongst the goods on its bill of lading were ‘Fifty mortuary containers, fully certificated, transported for the purpose of internment at Balhaut’. Further fine print revealed that each container held twenty human cadavers or partial cadavers, individually secured in closed caskets. They were men of the 250th Boruna Rifles, a native Balhaut regiment, and casualties of Aldo’s tragic failure on Helice. They were Balhaut lads, coming home.
Accompanying parties of mourners from San Velabo were listed on the passenger manifest. High-borns, some of them, by the look of the titles and honorifics, making the grand tour to Balhaut in a formal display of duty and respect. E. F. Montvelt straightened his collar, and brushed the sleeves of his coat. Courtesy, always courtesy.
The great hold jaws of the Solace were beginning to gape. Cantilevered metal tongues, cargo ramps and hinged bridgeways were extending to link the lamp-lit caverns of the hold spaces with the slipway dock. Bulk servitors were hoisting down the first of the containers. E. F. Montvelt saw more passengers and members of the crew coming down the nearest gangway bridge.
He saw two widows, arm-in-arm, with a single, twin-shafted mourning parasol held above their veiled heads. Behind them came three liveried servants bearing a rosewood chest, and a crewman in oily pressure gear draped with a roll of heavy cable. After them, a tired-looking colonel with an empty sleeve limped down the gangway beside his attentive adjutant, followed by a tall, athletic man in a long coat of beige leather. The man’s shaved head was sculptural and sharp-featured, as if it had been ergonomically designed. The balance of the skull seemed rather off: a cunning, clean-enough face, but a compact and streamlined cranium that seemed a little too small to match it. The man carried himself with a straight neck and a raised head that spoke of military formality.
Then E. F. Montvelt saw the other widow. She was dressed in long weeds of black silk, and carried a sable fan and a purple handkerchief. The skirts of her dress, silk and crepe layered, rustled as she moved. Her hair, white gold, was pinned up, and from it draped a veil of black gauze so fine it hung like smoke. He could not see her face, but he could see the pale, slender rise of her neck. The nape seemed indecent, like wilful nudity.