Burning Bright

Damian turned away, his mood lifting, and stepped out onto the narrow bow platform to loosen the tie there. His headache was fading now, in the morning air, was just an occasional pang behind his eyebrows. He could hear splashing as the stranger hauled himself up out of the canal, but did not bother to watch, walked aft instead and loosed the stern tie. He pushed hard against the piling, edging the stern toward the main current, and stepped down into the shallow steering well to hit the start sequence. The engine whined, then strengthened as the solar panels striping the deck woke to sunlight and began feeding power to the system, supplementing the batteries. The john-boat had already caught the main current, was drifting stern first toward the shadow of the factories. He swung the wheel, felt the rudder bite, tentative at first, then more solid as the propellers came up to speed, and eased open the throttle. The john-boat slowed even as the stern, the steering well, slipped into the wall of shadow. He felt the sudden chill on his shoulders, was blinded, looking out into the light, and then the propellers hit the speed that counteracted the current. The boat surged back into the sunlight, the water churned to foam in its wake. On the walkway, the stranger was shivering even in the sunlight, stamping his feet to let the worst of the water run off before he pulled on his clothes. Damian Chrestil wondered again, briefly, precisely who he was, and opened the throttle further, letting the pulse of the engine reverberate between the factory walls.

It was good to be back on the canals again, if only for a few hours, and he gave himself up to the pulse of the steering bar and the kick of the deck beneath his feet. You never really lost the skill, once learned; would always be able to run a john-boat, but it was good to feel the old ease returning. He grinned, and gave his full attention to the delicate job of bringing the boat out of the alley and into the feeder canal that led down to the Factory Lane and the Inland Water. There wasn’t much traffic yet, none of the swarming mob of gondas that would fill the lane and the service canals in an hour or so, carrying midrank workers to their supervisory jobs. The water buses that carried the ordinary workers to the assembly lines had been and gone, were tied up in the parking pools along the edge of Dry Cut to wait for the evening shift change. He reversed the propellers, cutting speed, and slipped the john-boat into the buoyed channel, bringing it neatly into line behind a barge piled high with shell scrap.

A light was blinking amber in the center of the control panel, had been for a few minutes, since before he left the feeder canal. He eyed it irritably, but knew he could not ignore it any longer. “Checkin,” he said, and the screen lit, the compressed in-house iconage skittering into place in the tiny display. He scanned it quickly, still with half an eye on the traffic in the channel, saw nothing that required his instant attention. He was about to switch off when the string of messages vanished, and a second message replaced them: Jafiera Roscha received third endangerment citation; please instruct.

Damian Chrestil stared at the message for a long moment, all his attention focused on the tiny characters, and had to swerve sharply to avoid a channel buoy. He knew Roscha, all right: one of C/B Cie.‘s better john-boat drivers, competent, aggressive, not one to ask awkward questions when she had a job to do. She was also what the canalli politely called accident-prone, except that she usually caused the accidents. He shook his head, said to the speaker mounted just below the screen, “Check in, direct patch to the wharfinger. Authorization: Damian Chrestil.”

There was a moment of silence as the system hunted for an unused uplink, the hissing static barely audible over the engine and the rush of water along the hull, and then the day dispatcher said, “I’m sorry, Na Damian, but Na Rosaurin’s on another line. Can I give her a message, or will you hold?”

“Give her a message,” Damian said. “Tell her to find Roscha and bring her in. I want to talk to her. And get me a copy of this endangerment complaint.”

“Absolutely, Na Damian.” The dispatcher’s sharp voice did not change, but Damian could imagine the lifted eyebrows. “I’ll pass those messages to Na Rosaurin, and put out a call for Roscha.”

“Thanks, Moreo,” Damian said, and added, to the system, “Close down.”

The system chimed obediently, and a string of icons flickered across the screen, their transit too fast to be read. Damian glared at the now-empty screen for a moment longer, then made himself concentrate on the increasing traffic as he came up on the buoy that marked the turn onto the Inland Water. He would deal with Roscha later.