"Beautiful, isn't she?" Tissaurd said quietly, her words breaking into his thoughts.
"Beautiful, at least," he mused. Somehow, it took another Helmsman to understand the way people could relate to starships. But then, Tissaurd seemed to understand lots of things about him. That's what made them such an effective team.
"Deadly, too..." she added. "Strange how such a graceful shape could have been created for the sole purpose of destruction."
" 'Protection' might be a better word," Brim offered.
"A nicer word, perhaps, Skipper," Tissaurd allowed softly, "but Starfury's primary purpose is still destruction, pure and simple. No matter how harmless we'd like to make her seem. Those ungodly disruptors give her true purpose away."
Brim nodded agreement as they walked. "Yeah," he said at length, "and our purpose as well. Just like those space forts the League seems to be putting up all over the galaxy." He took a deep breath of cold air. "One begets the other, I suppose...." Behind them, the graceful ship had already dwindled to a pattern of blurred lights. They continued wordlessly through the cottony solitude until Enterprise began to appear through the falling snow.
Brim never did have an opportunity to attend Commodore Tor's party. At the entry port, a message awaited him from Starfury. A top secret KA'PPA dispatch had just been received that required his personal receipt. Immediately directing Tissaurd to make his apologies, he trudged back to the ship only to discover that his urgent KA'PPA was merely notification of a state visit by one of the few influential politicians who remained untouched by the CIGAs. Nevertheless, it did require a direct personal answer, and he made it. After that he retired to his cabin for one of the few full nights of sleep he got during the trials.
Throughout the next fourteen Standard Days, some of their time was spent on dilapidated gravity pools, merely loading torpedoes, mines, and other expendable munitions. Other days' passed while they accomplished simplistic harbor exercises, while still others were devoted to actual space trials and the preliminary target exercises that would prove the ship's ability to fight. There could hardly have been more desolate surroundings in which to test the ship. The colossal maintenance yard to which they were assigned was occupied by gaunt, weatherworn figures of mammoth derricks and cranes silhouetted against storm-gray skies in the grip of perpetual winter; everything was covered by uniform layers of unceasing snow that had been unsullied by the tracks of living creatures for nearly a decade. The dying star Gimmas was long since dim beyond supporting any of the sentient life forms known in the Home Galaxy. There was a gaunt dignity to the surroundings, almost as if they were some gigantic vestige of a primordial civilization that pulled up cosmic stakes and departed long before the dawn of recorded history.
The crew had little enough time for pondering their surroundings and, for most, scant inclination to poke about the stormy landscape. Eyes and thoughts were constantly turned toward the ship and their tasks within her. Valerian's creation was already coming alive as more than ninety individual temperaments shook down together, melding into the single, unique personality that would become the mature Starfury. This was not only true in her wardroom—where the ship's leadership made the effect even more pronounced—but among the ratings as well. Like the cells of some bantling organism, they were beginning to work in concert, dedicating their energies and intellects on one exacting goaclass="underline" operation of a powerful warship whose deadly function was important to them, and the ancient nation that they called home. Their battles were in the future; in an as-yet-undeclared war. But each of the specially chosen crew understood that sometime in the near offing there would be dangerous work to do, and it would be worth doing.
During a rare hiatus from the trials. Brim checked out an elderly launch from what remained of Base Operations and flew to the deserted Eorean Starwharfs, his home for nearly three Standard Years at the beginning of his career. Touching down near an abandoned skeleton of what was once an elevated tram station, he labored through knee-deep snow beneath rows of dark Karlsson lamps, past the staring, broken windows of a half-tumbled guard station, then along nearly a c'lenyt of stone jetties and crumbling gravity pools to a small sign that had nearly disintegrated with rust. "Gravity Pool R-2134," it read.
Once—nearly an eon ago as Brim reckoned time—his life in the Fleet had begun here.
For a moment his mind's eye carried back across the years to that snowy dawn when he had first laid eyes on the wedge-shaped form of starship T.83, I.F.S. Truculent, testing her moorings in the amber glow of repulsion generators thundering steadily within the gaping walls of this now-empty pool.
Only Gimmas's perpetual wind broke the lonely stillness as it wailed 'round emaciated forms of towering cranes, rattled corrugated sheets in dilapidated sheds, moaned through the yawning mouths of broken windows, and hurried powdery snow ghosts among the run-down jetties. Out of sight somewhere, an unsecured door slammed against its frame to a totally irrational rhythm. CIGAs had destroyed Gimmas Haefdon with politics mightier than the League's most powerful disrupters.
Brim shivered in his heated Fleet Cloak. Despite the loneliness, this place—the whole colossal ruin for that matter—was far from empty. Every square iral was peopled by ghosts of one sort or another. And in the silence of the deserted complex, he could still hear the shrill whines of gravity generators spooling up before thundering into ground-shaking reality. As if it were yesterday, he recalled ice-blue tongues of free ions shooting back from open waste gates, great ships marching ponderously out onto the half-frozen bay, then soaring into the overcast, heroic comrades of all races striving together to turn the tide of a war that initially cast them in the role of underdogs. He sighed. So many of those brave men and women had paid the supreme toll, and for what? When fortunes began to reverse, Emperor Triannic quickly duped the Empire and her allies with his deceitful Treaty of Garak, then set up cowardly Puvis Amherst as chief of the CIGAs to destroy his nemesis Fleet from within.
Now, the great ships had departed, replaced by lonesome wind and a banging shutter. All that presently stood between Triannic and his dreams of conquest were the tag ends of a once-mighty war fleet, the handful of half-finished Starfuries a'building at Sherrington's, and the dogged resolution of a few remaining warriors who still believed dial freedom was worth fighting for—to the death.
As afternoon shadows lengthened in the stillness, Brim grimly retraced his steps to the launch and took off into the scudding gray clouds. But instead of setting a direct return course for the Central Complex, whimsy guided him only a short distance through the darkening sky before he set down again, this time in a wide courtyard fronting a snow-covered jumble of peaked roofs and tall stone chimneys.
Over the great boarded-up doorway, a weathered sign swung to the wind on rusted chains that were clearly in their last days of existence. "mermaid tavern," the faded letters blazoned in the gray twilight. "established 51690." Opposite, through the rusting metal gate, he could see what was once a country road, now buried irals deep in everlasting snow. On either side, tangled forms of long-dead treetops wound away in snowy perspective, mute reminders of summers now gone forever as the dimming star Gimmas continued its long march toward ultimate death.
He hadn't been here in years, but the ghost of his earliest love affair was inextricably linked to this abandoned country inn. Its once-cozy, candle-lit interior was the place of his first liaison with Her Serene Majesty, Princess Margot of the Effer'wyck Dominions and Baroness (Grand Duchess) of The Torond.