"I imagine," Katie replied. "But although I was born out here, my parents are both Earth born. I was conceived there. They're a lot more inclined to tolerating full time full Gee than most Belters. Hopefully it'll make it easier for me to acclimatize to the place."
"Should do," McLeod said, nodding before reverting to full tour guide mode.
The only other break in that came as they worked their way through the cargo module.
"Not much to see here," McLeod was saying, "just a few bins for small amounts of special time sensitive cargo," when Katie spotted something odd. She picked it up and looked it over. Organic, gray, and fibrous; she recognized it as, of all things, a tiny piece of tree bark.
"Damn, the Captain won't be happy to hear about that," McLeod said, looking over her shoulder.
"It's tree bark isn't it?" Katie asked. She didn't bother to keep the surprised wonder out of her voice.
McLeod looked, if anything, more unhappy. "Yeah," he said. He paused to clear his throat. "Captain lets Wong keep wood for his woodworking hobby in some of the unused cargo bins. Strictly speaking, it's not in accordance with regulations. Let me have that." He was blushing again.
Katie gave him the little bit of wood.
McLeod looked at her with concern. "Could you do me a favor?" he asked.
"Of course, sir," Katie answered. She had the feeling trouble had sniffed her out again, but she didn't know what else she could say.
"Could you not mention this to the Captain? Anyone really. Pretend it never happened? There's no reason to embarrass both of them and get Wong into trouble."
"Mum's the word, sir," Katie said trying to pass it off as a small favor.
McLeod gave her such a thankful smile she wanted to pet him on the head.
He didn't seem like a bad guy.
All the same she was going to keep her eyes open and watch her back here.
Something wasn't adding up.
9: Katie's Grand Adventure
Twenty-two hundred hours, an hour before Katie's graveyard shift sensor watch, and for the first time in almost a week she wasn't being watched.
Captain Anderson, Lieutenant (jg) Wong, and Lieutenant (sg) Gregorian were all racked out getting some badly needed rest. Lieutenant (sg) Romanov and Sub-Lieutenant McLeod were standing their watches on the bridge. McLeod at least would be genuinely busy surveying the local population of rocks.
If it'd ever been a mystery before, Katie no longer had any doubts why Scout Courier crews were dominated by the young and unattached. Cramped quarters and being adrift in a tiny bubble far from any other life weren't the only things. The routine was brutal and unrelenting.
Even given that Katie had the feeling they'd been working extra hard to keep her too busy to ask many questions or to poke around. Tired themselves out first in the progress. Ha.
Having checked where everyone was, she didn't waste time. It was seconds to scoot back into the cargo area and flip a few bins open. She'd already ascertained that they weren't instrumented. There was no logging of accesses. The Space Force trusted its crews. No place to go with anything, anyway.
Anyhow, what it added up to is if she hurried she could take a peek at what they were carrying, and nobody would be the wiser.
The bit of bark had perplexed her more and more as she thought about it. Wood working was a strange hobby for someone on an asteroid base where importing wood from Earth was bound to be extraordinarily expensive. Also, why pay to ship bark? Why not finished wood that wouldn't have wastage?
What she saw in several of the bins did not answer her question. It was rough wood. Not large pieces of it. It looked like a mixture of very large sticks and small tree trunks, a variety of types, though she knew next to nothing about types of trees. A lot of bark, and it'd be hard to make a single, good sized plank out of it.
What was Wong making? Walking sticks? Small figurines? Didn't make sense, but she couldn't take time to ponder it any more than she could ask Wong outright.
She scooted right back to cabin section. The sleeping tubes came in pairs, but there was no other passenger. She had a whole "cabin equivalent" to herself. The sound proofing between the "cabin equivalents" was excellent, so nobody noticed she wasn't bunked out for the few minutes her little recce took.
She was back up after a short nap to grab what the crew still called "midnight scran" despite it being an hour earlier. Then eight hours of a sensor watch surveying the local rocks. Exercise hour, breakfast, and some proper sleep.
As she lay her head down to rest, she wondered what was going on.
One thing for sure, she wasn't asking any questions.
* * *
The sensor watches had proved to be surprisingly interesting. The Sand Piper worked through its survey sectors at a significantly faster pace than the Dawn Threader did. Neither did the Space Force crew take periodic breaks from their surveying. They kept at it twenty-four seven. They did after all have the crew to allow that. They also had military grade gear. Much better than anything that had to be commercially viable.
Also, Katie had to admit the Space Force officers were much better trained on that gear than her parents were or she had been. She'd thought she was pretty good, but McLeod in particular had shown her a few tricks useful in interpreting the spectrum reflected by odd pieces of rock. Even Romanov who was the pilot during her watches had proven to have useful advice. He wasn't drawing a sensor watch now, but he'd done his time.
In particular since the Space Force valued speed in resolving the nature of sensor contacts, he'd shown her quick rules of thumb that helped nail down what something was composed of much faster than what she'd been used to. Theoretically, quickly distinguishing between a rock and something artificial and metallic could be the difference between life and death for a Space Force crew.
Lieutenant (jg) Samuel Romanov had also proved to be good company, full of stories about his hi-jinks on Earth and at the Academy. Katie was finding them entertaining as well as informational. Katie wasn't sure if the informational part was intended. She was learning a lot about Earth and the Academy, and even better about how the people there thought.
So it was a surprise when she finished their survey of the current sector early, and Romanov didn't look happy.
"Well, isn't that impressive?" he said, his words not fully agreeing with his body language or tone. "I didn't think there was any chance you'd get that far along in just one watch."
"You guys have been really helpful," Katie said. "I've learned a lot here."
He smiled wanly. "Glad to have been of help." He stared at his console, digesting the information about what she'd done. When he looked up, his smile didn't make it to his eyes which looked a bit glassy. He wasn't blinking enough. How odd. It occurred to her Samuel Romanov wasn't used to being anything but honest. "I think it wouldn't hurt to go over these bodies here again," he said. "Use the tactical fire control radar and ping them hard. It'll be a useful learning exercise. Take the rest of the watch. Save me the trouble of moving on to the next sector. Captain didn't have that sector scheduled until Gregorian and Wong were on anyways."
Katie looked at him, uncertain how to respond. As much as she'd like getting to play with the tactical radar what he'd said didn't make a lot of sense unless the point was to keep her from being on watch during the survey of the next sector. No way she was going to say that.
"Yes, sir," she said. "This is going to be fun."
* * *
There were two layers of sound insulation between Katie in her sleeping tube and the rest of the Sand Piper. The tube itself was well insulated and the cabin equivalent space had an additional layer of sound proofing. There was no need for the crew to hear the sounds of each other dressing, showering, and crapping. The quarters were claustrophobic enough as it was.
So when the ship started to maneuver to dock with something, Katie didn't hear anything in the normal range of the human auditory system. That was blocked out. What wasn't blocked out was the lower
and higher frequencies and the tiny tremors transmitted through the frame of the ship itself. Things most people would never notice. That majority of the population that hadn't lived their entire lives on board a space ship.
Katie was space born. She'd learned to touch a part of her ship's frame and feel what was running at much the same time she'd learned to walk. As she'd grown older, she'd learned the feel and patterns of different sorts of operations. Learned to feel them even in her sleep.
So when the Sand Piper began to maneuver for a rock rendezvous, Katie didn't need to hear anything or be watching a data display to know something was up. She didn't even need to be awake. The change in the ship's normal feel was enough to wake her.
It was Gregorian and Wong's watch. She'd gotten to know both of them to a degree during watch change overs. Wong had been distant and reserved if polite on the rare occasions he spoke. But Iris Gregorian, the pilot, had been friendly and helpful. She'd been full of advice and stories about what it was like to be a woman in the Space Force. Things like, "Doesn't matter about your personal plumbing the Space Force expects you to put it first. All outside interests, including family, are second to its needs. It's harder on us girls than the guys."
So in the normal course of events, Katie would have been surprised Iris hadn't let her know about a maneuver Katie might be interested in observing.
Given the crew's odd behavior ever since she'd joined, surprise wasn't the emotion she felt. Rather an alert wariness was. If they hadn't told her what was going on, they didn't want her to know. She didn't bother to pop out her tube and go to the bridge to check it out.
Rather, she logged on to the Sand Piper's internal network from the terminal in her sleeping tube. Usually used for messages and bedtime entertainment, it was in fact capable of much more.
Whatever the nature of the skullduggery the Sand Piper's crew were involved in, they were complete amateurs at it. The Captain could have locked her out of everything except messages and the entertainment library when she'd first come on board. She'd have never known that wasn't normal. Nobody let children and random passengers remotely control engineering from any arbitrary terminal after all.
As it was Katie wasn't sure the Captain had even thought of it. By default, the crew gave every evidence of being highly trusting and indifferent to security. As a concerned citizen and prospective future Space Force officer, Katie was rather alarmed. She couldn't help thinking the Space Force was vulnerable to attack. It'd be a soft target for criminals or terrorists.
Right now it was very convenient for her. She brought up the navigation screens and outside cameras without any problems. She'd checked a couple of days ago and there didn't even seem to be any logging. If you couldn't be bothered to review logs, and why would you, it was a nuisance.
The cameras showed the Sand Piper laying itself alongside a large rock the size of the ship itself. Once the Sand Piper had settled in at a fixed distance from it Katie felt the very slight shudder thump of the external air lock cycling. A short while afterwards a pair of figures and a train of large cargo bins appeared and drifted towards the anonymous space rock. Reaching it, they messed about for a while before returning with a different set of bins in tow.
At that point Katie was spooked enough to log out, turn down the lights, and pretend to herself she was sleeping.
There was little doubt now. The Sand Piper's crew were smugglers. She shivered. Depending on what it was they were smuggling and to who it could be worth as much as her life if they learned she knew that.
She had most of another week in close contact with them, during which she had to pretend she didn't.
After that, she didn't know.
Did she report it to someone? To who?
Maybe, in fact, almost certainly thinking cynically, it'd be better to pretend it'd never happened. That she knew nothing.
Maybe some day she'd learn to be that cynical.
But not yet.
* * *
Sometimes Katie hated herself. Her expectations were too often harsh and uncompromising. She tried to soften them for other people. It wasn't reasonable to expect everyone else to go to great efforts, even take risks, to act the way she thought they should. She didn't always succeed.
With herself, she was less forgiving.
Which is how she found herself, risking possibly her life and without doubt her future plans and happiness, making another near midnight trip back to the cargo section. Despite there supposedly being no night or day in space, the Sand Piper's crew seemed to regard the hours between 2100 and 0600 as nighttime. A time when anyone not required on duty should be in their bunks sleeping or at least relaxing.
Convenient for her, though she'd have welcomed the excuse not to be making the quick minutes long trip that she was.
She found strangely odd looking cargo containers in the ship's cargo bins. Opening one she saw it was full of thick rectangular almost square slabs roughly twenty centimeters a side. They had puffy, rounded edges. She recognized them as alien, Star Rat, hand held data access devices. Packaged with them were multiple packages that looked a lot like plastic pegboards with transparent coverings. In each peg hole there was a small hexagonal crystalline rod, each with a pair of little labels, one with alien symbols, the other in the Latin alphabet. Space Rat data shards.
Technology the Space Rats had claimed they couldn't legally give humans. She didn't doubt the hardware was also full of data they also said they were prohibited from passing on to humanity.
Geez Louise, this was severely above her non-existent pay grade.
She scuttled back to her sleeping tube as quickly and quietly as she could.
So she wasn't sure why the Space Rats wanted fresh sticks from Earth although she had read they were beaver analogs, so maybe that had something to do with it. It was very clear that the Sand Piper was part of a ring smuggling things to and from them. She wondered who was in on it.
She knew where the incriminating evidence was. Who could she tell about it? Safely. She couldn't be sure who it was safe to talk to. Who was in on it and who wasn't?
Yet another risk that she wished she wasn't going to take.
But she had to, to be able to live with herself.
This could be big.
Correct that. This was big.
* * *
Guy Boucher ate his lunchtime meal of red curry and rice with a methodical slowness.
He watched Commander Yuri Tretyak across the table while doing so.
The Commander was going on at length about the brilliance of what he'd done with the Kincaid girl. It took only the odd grunt and word of encouragement to keep him going.
Guy had long wondered if the Commander could be for real. He'd been leaning to the theory that he was. That as amazing as it seemed that the Commander really was as clueless and out of touch with reality as he appeared to be.
Under long sustained observation, the man had been consistent. Oblivious to what was going on under his nose. Convinced as a newly hatched school graduate from a sheltered home that the world worked the way those in authority said it did. That those people only had everybody's best interest in mind. That all the rules and regulations they promulgated and the people they used to enforce them existed solely for the benefit of the greater good. He stopped just short of believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Guy wasn't sure about the Tooth Fairy.
Guy thought it was incredible that anyone of at least average intelligence who'd been out and about in the world for more than a few years could be so naïve. Nevertheless, the Commander had never once slipped out of character. Guy didn't believe that anyone could have such an inhuman degree of acting ability either. In the end, he'd come down on the side of the idea that the Commander was a natural innocent. Did lying to himself serve some psychological purpose? Looked like it.
Recently, he wasn't so sure of that analysis.
Recently, the Commander had made a series of decisions regarding the Kincaid girl that had proven
very inconvenient for Guy.
Opinion on Ceres had long been ambivalent regards her. It hadn't been able to decide between two possibilities. Was she was some sort of child prodigy that had trouble coloring within the lines? Or was she plain out a troublemaker with delusions of grandeur who couldn't be bothered to try? Guy had started working quietly in the background on swaying opinion to the downside regards her. Preparation for a more open move when the time was ripe.
The Commander, apparently unbeknownst to himself or the girl herself, had put a spike in that wheel. The whole Miss Ping episode had crystallized opinion around the idea that the girl was some sort of genius. Not an ill intentioned one either, even if she did have a habit of being awkward.
Everybody with kids, or even the kids themselves if they had any ambition, knew who Miss Ping was. She was the primary obstacle to getting a secondary education that'd be recognized outside of the Belt. But as harsh as she was, and as difficult as her course was, nobody had ever thought she wasn't fair in how she imposed her Draconian standards.
Kincaid had managed the unprecedented feat of testing out of the course. She'd also somehow managed to keep Ping sweet in the process. It was the talk of the rock.
A fact the Commander was somehow, ostensibly, unaware of.
"Another great point about sending her out on patrol with the Sand Piper is that's there no conceivable way she can somehow manage to cut the exercise short," the Commander was saying. "Not like what happened with Miss Ping or on the line."
Guy grunted in reply. Was this guy serious?
The grunt was the only permission the Commander needed to continue his spiel. He sounded for all the world like a salesman for Belt tours by prospective Academy candidates.
He was going on about how sending the girl off on the little ship guaranteed her safety.
If the Commander wasn't on the up and up Guy had to think he was being deliberately provoked.
Billy was an ongoing loose end to which the Kincaid girl was attached. If he had it to do over again Guy might have promoted her candidacy to Yuri in the interests of getting her off of Ceres and somewhere far away as soon as possible. As it was he'd elected for a more final solution.
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