Engineman - Eric Brown [20]
He turned and walked down the avenue, and it was as if he had entered another realm, a nightmare past in which the symbols of his younger days had been perversely maligned by the ongoing process of entropy. One either side, rows of wrecked and dilapidated starships dwindled to vanishing point - bigships and smallships, scout-ships and survey-vessels, colony-liners like compacted cities and planetary ferries, life-boats, tugs, salvage-ships as ugly as deep-sea fish, sun-divers, two-man boats, express cutters and slowboats pushed once by Gamma crews... He slowed his pace, gazing around in wonder. Every type of spatial architecture was represented here: vertical ships as streamlined as needles, horizontal craft like bulky leviathans; squat blocks on bent stanchion-legs like crabs, oval vessels like polished gems. Many gave the impression of being gloriously intact - though Mirren knew that their innards had been ripped out - and many more, tragically, had been strategically dismembered to prevent cannibalisation or salvaging by renegade Enginemen. He passed lots given over to portioned quarters of bigships: tail-sections and lone nose-cones, stranded mid-sections and rearing fins as large as smallships themselves, honeycombed radiation baffles, observation domes, astrodomes, flanks and bulkheads and pitiful cross-sections of 'ships like the carcasses of slaughtered beasts. Perhaps even more devastating than the piecemeal state of the vessels, however, was the attention of the extraterrestrial flora. Some of the smaller 'ships were cocooned, others had their legs and tori enwrapped in clinging skirts of jungle growth. Mirren did not fail to see the irony: for years these vessels had ranged among the stars, vanguards of humankinds' conquest; now the flora of the planets they had conquered was exacting an eloquent revenge.
He found lane three and turned down the narrow aisle. He passed the shell of a rusting smallship, then a bigship missing the domed section of its forward command bridge like the unfortunate victim of some abandoned brain surgery. He came to a halt, there was something painfully familiar about the nose-cone of the bigship which obtruded from its resting place and overhung the lane. The curving panels of its flank were obscured by a beard of purple-leafed vine, but Mirren glimpsed an ornate name-plate through the leaves. He climbed onto the back of a wrecked tug-tractor, reached out and swept aside the vine.
The Pride of Paramatta... He repeated the name, savouring the alliteration on his tongue, the flood of memories it provoked. He had never actually pushed the Paramatta - it was an early Class II survey vessel decommissioned the very year he graduated - but as a boy he'd often watched it phase into the Sydney spaceport and dreamed of one day becoming an Engineman, never for a second imagining that thirty years later the 'ship would be a thing of the past, and he with it.
He released the vines, allowed them to spring back into place and obscure the name-plate. He jumped down, dusting his hands together, and continued along the lane. He had never before realised quite how beautiful a mausoleum could be.
He came to lot seven. Parked upon it was an old-fashioned perpendicular exploration vessel, an attenuated arrow-head of blue steel. It was tall and proud against the rising sun, intact but for its nose-section fins. Mirren wondered how many planets this 'ship had discovered, how many other suns it had stood proudly beneath.
He looked around the weed-choked tarmac for Jaeger.
"Hello down there!" The cry echoed from high above.
Mirren craned his neck. Halfway up the tapering flank of the bigship, someone stood on a railed observation platform. The grey-suited figure waved. "Mr Mirren! Please, join me."
Mirren crossed the tarmac to the makeshift stairway - a metal chock, an oil barrel - and climbed through the arched hatch.