As the starship pulled into a berth above the first new world, the Master Engineer slipped into the therapy chamber, watching Pamir finish a two-hour cycle of isometrics. Then quietly, with a mixture of scorn and curiosity, she told him, “Harum-scarums don’t appreciate bribes. Ever.”
Pamir nodded, vacuuming the oily sweat from his face and chest.
“You gave him no choice,” said the older, more cautious engineer. “According to his nature, the poor fellow had to seek vengeance.”
“I knew all that,” he replied. “I just didn’t expect a nuke up my ass.”
“What did you expect?”
“A simple fight.”
“And you thought you’d win?”
“No. I figured that I’d lose.” Then he laughed in a calm, grim fashion. “But I also figured that I’d survive. And the creature would have to give me his job.”
“But that’s my decision to make,” warned the Master.
Pamir didn’t blink.
His commander sighed heavily, gazing off in a random direction. “Your opponent’s gone,” she admitted. “Along with half of my staff. These terraformers are paying bonuses for good engineers, and bad ones, trying to make their lumps of rock livable.”
Pamir waited a moment, then asked, “So did I earn my post?”
The old woman had to nod. “But you could have done nothing,” she told him. “Nothing, and you would have gotten what you wanted anyway.”
“That’s two different things,” was his response.
“What do you mean?”
“Either you pay for something, or it’s charity,” he explained. “And I don’t care how long I live. Everything I get, I pay for. Or my hands won’t hold it.”
Buoyed by talent and discipline and a disinterest in better work, Pamir eventually rose to the position of Master Engineer.
In the next sixteen hundred years, the old ship underwent two rehabilitations. The final rehab stripped away its outdated bomb drive, a fusion drive installed in its place, complete with merry-go-round nozzles and antimatter spiking. They were running ten thousand colonists out to an Earth-class world. Ahead of them were the thick fringes of another sun’s Oort cloud. Oorts were lousy places for starships. Obstacles were too scarce to map, too common to ignore. But the risks were usually slight, and because of time and a fat debt riding with them, the Master Captain decided to cut through the fringes.
When the ship was rehabilitated, the old push-plate was stripped of its extra mass and bolstered with new grades of hyperfiber, and the whole clumsy apparatus was fastened to the nose. The plate absorbed dust impacts. Railguns obliterated pebbles and little snowballs, while the old bomb drive launched nukes at the largest obstacles, vaporizing them at what was hopefully a safe distance.
An engineer was necessary to oversee sudden, unexpected repairs of key systems. On most starships, the Master Engineer delegated the job. As a young man, Pamir might have had the stomach for that kind of bullying. But he had lived most of his life on this cranky ship, and he knew it better than anyone else. That’s why he dressed in a life-suit and armor, then walked up into the push-plate’s familiar passageways, living inside his suit for twenty-five lull days, half a dozen malfunctions cured because of his quick, timely work.
Pamir never saw the incoming comet.
His only warning was the rapid, almost panicked firing of railguns and nukes.Then the nukes quit launching when the target was too close, and with a mathematical clarity, Pamir realized that the impact was coming, and for no useful reason, he pulled himself into a ball, hands over his knees and a deep last breath filling his lungs- Then, blackness.
More empty than any space, and infinitely colder.
Everyone hovering around him was a stranger, and none wanted to tell him about the passengers, the crew, or the fate of his ship.
Finally, a well-intentioned Eternitist minister let out the news. “You’re a fortunate, fortunate man,” he proclaimed, his smiling face matching his smiling, almost giddy voice. “Not only did you survive, dear man. But a ship of kind Belters found your remains inside that old push-plate.”
Again, Pamir’s body was being decanted from almost nothing. Still unfinished and desperately weak, he was lying in a white hospital bed, inside a zero-gee habitat, a soft webbing strung over his naked body, bristling with sensors that tirelessly marked his steady progress.
Despite his weakness, he reached for the minister.
Thinking it was a gesture of need, the man tried to take the hand with his hands. But no, the hand slipped past and closed on the nearest shoulder, then yanked at the heavy black fabric of his robe. And with a voice too new to sound human, Pamir grunted, “What about… about the rest of them…?”
With a blissful surety, the minister said, “Long, happy lives received their deserved rest. Which is precisely as it should be.”
Pamir clamped his hand around the exposed neck. The minister tried removing the hand, and failed. “All of them died in a painless instant,” he croaked. “Without worry. Without the slightest suffering. Isn’t that the way you, in your time, would wish to die?”
The hand tightened, then let up again. And with that new voice, Pamir said, “No,” as the newborn eyes gazed off into the distance, losing their focus. “I want suffering. I want worry. When you see Death—soon, I hope—I want you to tell It. I want the worst It has. The shittiest worst. I want it all the way till the miserable end…”
Centuries had passed while Pamir’s body drifted between the stars. He found himself living in a thinly colonized region of human space, among scattered settlements reaching to the brink of the Milky Way. Only one event of consequence had occurred in his absence, and it was enormous. Pamir learned that an alien starship had been discovered between the galaxies. No one knew where it came from or why it was here. But every important world and species were marshaling resources to reach it and claim it for themselves.
By simple luck, humans had seen it first. They had the jump. The Belter guild, vast in its reach and rich with experience, had opted to build a fleet of swift ships. And to get a lead on the other groups, the guild would launch its first ships before they were finished—small asteroids chosen for the proper mix of metals and carbonaceous goo and water ice, minimal tunnels cut through them, durable habitats built deep and safe, then engines and vast fuel tanks strapped to the raw exterior.
Every engineer in the region had been put under contract by the Belters: for their know-how and their hands, and oftentimes, just to keep the talent pool dry, making life hard for their competitors.
His deep-space experience meant that Pamir was included on the lead team.
Rumors promised that some fraction of the team would be included on the great mission. At first, Pamir assumed that he would be invited to join the Belters, and that he would refuse. The alien ship was interesting enough, but this district was a virtual wilderness. A man with wealth and his own starship could visit dozens of alien worlds, none of which had ever seen a human face before. As adventures went, he believed that was the bigger one. And with that decided, Pamir believed his future was set.
One early morning, he found himself floating inside a grimy, dust-choked tunnel, ignoring a heated discussion between architects and bolidologists. The precise angle of this very minor tunnel was the subject, and Pamir couldn’t have been more bored. Prayers for a distraction, any distraction, were answered suddenly. A hundred captains appeared, drifting along in a loose chain, each having just arrived from places deep inside the Milky Way and all wearing the new mirrorlike uniforms that had been invented specifically for this one great mission.