by Marko Kloos
“What do you think?” Kee asked her. Both the Hanzo men by her side were scanning her face, waiting for a reaction.
“It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen,” she said, momentarily robbed of her entire Acheroni vocabulary.
Hanzo had a fleet of surface transport pods waiting. They were all four seaters, and Cuthbert, Solveig’s corporate security agent, insisted on riding with her and Anja. Kee took the fourth seat, eager to show off his home city some more.
Coriolis City was everything she had expected it to be, and at the same time it was nothing like her expectations. According to Kee, the social topography of Acheron cities was the opposite of that of any other large city she knew. The street level was the most desirable layer, not the top floors, and the outside of the city was more desirable than the center. The transport pod had a clear roof, and Solveig could see countless skyways connecting buildings in every direction.
“Our fresh air comes from below, not above,” Kee explained when she asked him the reasons for the difference. “Our outer ring is closer to the dome. Better views, closer to the periphery parks. And if you live at street level, you don’t have to waste time with vertical travel.”
Their column rode along kilometer after kilometer of sensory overload. Solveig saw hundreds of shops, businesses, amusement complexes, and residence towers, interspersed with parks and plazas and unfamiliar buildings whose mystery was only enhanced by the fact that she couldn’t read much of the signage. Acheroni writing was the hardest part of learning the language, and it was difficult to decipher syllable sequences when they were spelled out on holographic projections she passed at fifty kilometers per hour. It was all so wildly foreign and unusual that it made her heart leap in her chest with every unfamiliar sighting.
I’m finally here, she thought. I finally get to see another planet. And Papa is a hundred million kilometers away right now.
Then she looked over at Cuthbert. The security officer caught her glance and smiled curtly, then returned his attention to the street outside of his window again. Solveig suppressed a sigh. As long as she had him tagging along, she knew that Papa would only be as far away from her as the comtab in Cuthbert’s suit pocket, thanks to the instant data traffic of the Mnemosyne.
The unintended drawbacks of quantum entanglement, she thought.
Her private comtab hummed its brief incoming message alert. She pulled it out of her pocket and looked at the contents of the message in the palm of her hand, unwilling to open a screen projection that Cuthbert would be able to read in mirror image.
Do you have dinner plans yet?
She smiled and looked out of the window. From what she could tell, every third or fourth shop out there was a noodle joint.
I do, but you’ll find it tricky to join me. I’m on Acheron on business. Tonight it’s whatever the locals are having. Wish me luck with the spice scale gamble.
She sent the reply off into the Mnemosyne to Detective Berg. His response came just a few seconds later.
Jealous.
She tucked the comtab away again and smiled at the thought of the tousled-haired detective scratching his head and writing his one-word response in the middle of the culinary row in Sandvik. Right now, not even the presence of Papa’s electronic leash in Cuthbert’s pocket would temper her enjoyment of something she had been looking forward to since the first week of university. And if Cuthbert wanted to report in detail on the walk to the nearest noodle shop she had planned for the evening, he was welcome to waste his time, and Papa’s, too.
CHAPTER 12
ADEN
“What a piece of junk,” Tess said in an awestruck voice. The expression on her face was a blend of disgust and admiration. “If that shit bucket can pull more than three g without shaking itself apart, I’ll eat a square meter of their deck lining.”
The image on the forward bulkhead projection was a high-resolution visual of the ship they were supposed to meet for cargo transfer. Aden knew next to nothing about spaceships, but even he could tell that the ship a hundred kilometers off their starboard bow was beyond its best space-going years. It was a freighter of some sort, considerably larger than Zephyr, but it didn’t look sleek and new like their little speed yacht. It looked like it had been assembled out of spare parts from half a dozen ships, and none of those parts looked like they were originally designed to fit together in this fashion.
“It’s no wonder they need to hire someone for a stealth run,” Maya said. “That would be the worst smuggling ship ever. The Rhodies could get a sensor return from a million klicks away.”
“Look at that,” Tess pointed. “Someone welded on external tanks to extend the range. They just ran twenty meters of fuel line externally so it would connect to the original feed without having to cut into bulkheads. If you try to dock that contraption at Oceana, the station controller will have a coronary event. I’m not sure we should even be this close to them.”
“Well, at least we know they’re not pirates,” Captain Decker said. “Not in that.”
“During the war, the Rhodies and the fuzzheads would fuck each other up with Q-ships sometimes,” Tristan cautioned from his gravity couch next to Aden’s. “They’d arm the shit out of a freighter and weld a bunch of junk to it to make it look like some run-down cargo tug, fake a transponder ID. Patrol corvette pulls alongside for inspection, blam. Full broadside.”
“That’s no Q-ship,” Maya scoffed. “There’s a bunch of shit welded to it, all right. But it’s no decoy. That’s genuine junkyard engineering.”
She cycled through a database of hull profiles with her free hand.
“Even the AI can’t quite figure it out. But it looks like it came out of an Oceanian shipyard. A long, long time ago. Maybe one of the Delphine-class protein haulers. They built about a hundred subvariants of those.”
“Aden, contact the OMV Rickety Garbage over there. Tell them we’re here, and that we are about to come alongside for cargo transfer,” Decker said. “Low-power tight-beam.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Aden replied. He brought up the screen for the ship-to-ship comms.
“Very low power,” Maya added. “You don’t want to set that hull on fire with a few watts too many.”
The Rickety Garbage went by the name of Iron Pig, which even Maya had to admit was a pretty good moniker for a junkyard special. They came alongside twenty minutes later, flying a more cautious approach than usual. Up close, the patchwork nature of the other ship was even more apparent. Aden hadn’t known that there was such a thing as an ugly weld seam, but it was included on the long list of engineering sins Tess spotted and called out on their approach.
“I just hope they still have a standard docking ring underneath all that,” she concluded. “I’m not transferring a quarter ton of cargo via zip line at one g.”
“Speed and course matched at one-g acceleration,” Maya announced from above. “Ready to commence in-flight docking.”
Tess stopped her engineering critique and concentrated on the screen in front of her. She went through the docking sequence with practiced speed. They were all back in vacsuits now, which was standard attire for any operations that carried the risk of hull damage. In this case, the likelihood seemed a fair bit greater than normal as far as Aden could tell, which made his suit a comfort instead of a nuisance. Whenever he started to let himself forget that a spaceship was just a fragile cylinder of air traveling through a vacuum that was hostile to life in a million ways, something usually came up that reminded him of that fact in unpleasant ways. He watched Tess and the contents of her screen as she extended Zephyr’s docking collar to mate up with the attachment ring around Iron Pig’s airlock.
“Green light,” she said when the collar had connected and locked into place. “Pressurizing now. Docking collar has atmo. We are good to go, boys and girls.”
“Iron Pig, we show a hard lock on the collar,” Aden sent to the other ship. “Ready to commence transfer operations.”
“Zephyr, we confirm
a hard lock as well,” the other side replied. Whoever was on Iron Pig’s comms spoke Rhodian with a nondescript inflection. Most crews ran voice traffic in their native language and let the comms AI on the receiving end translate their speech as needed, but Aden liked to listen to the original voice whenever he could. It was a good way to keep his own ear attuned to the different accents and dialects.
“Is the neighborhood clear?” Decker asked.
“Nothing but us and this death trap here for at least a million klicks,” Maya replied.
“All right. Let’s get on with this so we can be on our way. I don’t want to fly alongside that thing any longer than we must. Henry and Tess, go down to the airlock deck and receive the cargo. Aden, go with them and lend a hand if they need it. We’ll keep an eye on things from up here.”
Aden unbuckled his harness and got out of his gravity couch. When Henry climbed down from the command platform, he saw that the first officer wore his kukri on his left side, attached to the utility loops on the outside of the vacsuit.
“Maya, do a weapons scan when their people are in the collar,” Decker said. “Anyone carries any hardware, you put a hard seal on the airlock, and we’ll see where it goes from there.”
“You got it.”
It hadn’t really occurred to Aden before that Zephyr, with all its speed and stealth, might be vulnerable to pirates just like any other civilian merchant. But they hadn’t done an in-flight transfer with anyone since he got on board, and it was logical that this was a calculated security risk. They could outrun any ship or hide from it, but allowing a physical connection between airlocks out here in the middle of nowhere instead of the safety of a space station constituted one half of a forced boarding process already, and it was the difficult half.
He climbed down the ladder to the airlock deck. Henry and Tess followed him, and he cleared the space underneath the ladder as soon as his feet were on the deck. When they were all through the maneuvering-deck hatch, Aden watched the hatch cover swing into place and seal off the opening.
Henry walked over to the main airlock and opened the inner hatch. The outer hatch had a small Alon porthole in it. He stepped in front of it and peeked through.
“Let’s see what they have for us,” he said.
Tess accessed the control pad next to the inner hatch and projected a screen that showed the outside of the ship just beyond the airlock. The hull of Iron Pig loomed like a dirty steel wall just ten meters away. The other ship had been painted once, but whatever was left of the original coat was so worn and bleached by sunlight that Aden couldn’t even guess at the colors.
The other ship’s airlock hatch opened slowly, retracting backward and into the hull in two halves that were separated diagonally. Three people were in the airlock on the other side, a freight container on a transfer float between them. They made their way out into the pressurized docking collar, pushing the float along in front.
“Weapons check negative,” Maya said over their helmet comms. “That doesn’t mean they don’t have sharp sticks or something.”
“I’m not too worried about sharp sticks,” Henry said. He pulled the hardware release handle on the control panel and twisted it to disarm the locking mechanism. The outer airlock hatch unlocked and slid sideways into its recess in the hull.
The three Iron Pig crew members who walked into Zephyr’s airlock deck a few moments later looked like they belonged on a different ship. Their pressure suits were all new, or close to it. It took Aden a moment to figure out why their appearance stood out to him beyond their newness. Most freighter crews had company-branded suits with name tags, patches, and various personal touches. These were plain and uniform, with no identifying markers.
Henry raised the visor on his helmet in a customary gesture of welcome. Face shields of pressure-suit helmets were coated with an opaque radiation layer that obscured the face of the wearer, so it was good manners to raise them before talking in a pressurized environment. Aden and Tess followed suit. After a moment, the visitors raised theirs as well. One of them looked around and nodded his approval.
“That’s a nice ship,” he said in Rhodian. “Hanzo built?”
“Tanaka,” Henry replied, and the other man nodded again.
“Ah. Custom shop. Not many of those around. Never seen this model before.”
“Is that all of it?” Henry asked. “That one container.”
“Yes, that’s all of it. You got a spot in mind? It’s 278.55 kilos.”
Henry pointed at one of the cargo markers on the deck flooring.
“Over there on the green one will do.”
The visitors moved their float over to the green marker Henry had indicated and lowered the container onto it. Tess walked over to inspect the cargo from all angles. When she was satisfied that it was just a standard quarter-height shipping container that was properly locked and sealed, she activated the hold-downs, and four clamps extended from recesses in the deck flooring to secure the container on each corner.
“It’s not tripping the explosives scan,” Maya told them from the command deck. Henry nodded. Just because it wasn’t a bomb didn’t mean the contents weren’t dangerous, but at least they wouldn’t get blown to pieces by a clever salvager who was after the palladium in the rotor assembly of their gravmag compensator. Aden tried to guess the nature of the cargo. Weapons? Drugs? A deadly virus prototype? A fugitive in cryo? It could be two hundred-plus kilos of anything. The only certainty he had was that it was illegal, otherwise the owners wouldn’t need to hire an expensive courier to smuggle it into Rhodian space. When he had agreed to take the contract with the rest of the crew, the idea of a smuggling run had seemed vaguely exciting and adventurous. Now that the goods were bolted down on Zephyr’s deck, it felt unsettling.
“Everything looks good,” Tess said.
“If that’s all you have for us, then we’ll be on our way,” Henry told the Iron Pig crew members. “Thank you for your business. We’ll deliver on time. We always do.”
“We aren’t worried,” their leader said. Aden noticed that he was the only one of them who had spoken. “Safe and profitable travels.”
Their visitors filed out of the airlock again, pushing their empty float. The one with the float had to go first because of the bulk of the device. His two colleagues lingered in the airlock as they waited their turn to step into the collar. Just before they stepped out, one of them said something in a low voice to his companion, who chuckled.
Something about the exchange triggered vague recognition in Aden’s brain. He hadn’t understood what the Iron Pig spacer had said to his leader—he was standing at the foot of the ladderway, and they’d had their exchange in the airlock, ten meters away and facing away from him—but it had sounded familiar somehow, as if it had involved some mostly forgotten vocabulary from a language course twenty years ago.
Henry closed the airlock hatch behind the departing spacers. He stepped back into the main deck and sealed the inner hatch as well.
“Cargo secured and airlock buttoned up,” he said over the shipboard comms to Decker and Maya.
“Understood,” Decker replied. “Come on up and strap in so we can get out of here. Maya is getting twitchy with that safety hazard right off our port side.”
Overhead, the maneuvering-deck hatch unlocked and opened. Aden started the brief climb to the deck above. Before he passed through the hatch opening, he glanced at the cargo container that was now securely clamped to the deck below. It was a regulation-sized yellow polymer Class I container, identical to dozens they had transported before. But something about this whole exchange made Aden feel uneasy about that plastic box, and he couldn’t figure out why.
It’s your first smuggling run, he reminded himself when he strapped himself into his gravity couch again. It would be shocking if it didn’t make you uneasy.
Henry and Tess didn’t seem worried. Tess took her place on the gravity couch to Aden’s left. Henry’s was on the other side of the deck, facing Ade
n and Tess. Tristan sat on Aden’s right side. There were two more couches on the maneuvering deck, but they were empty because Zephyr had space on board for two extra bodies. Each of the ship’s two crew berth decks had one berthing compartment that stood empty, intended for temporary passengers. Tess and Henry strapped in without hurry and reclined their couches into maneuvering position to prepare for acceleration.
“Docking collar retracted and secured,” Maya said. “We are clear and free to maneuver. Burning for one and a half g. Farewell and safe journey, Iron Pig.”
“And best of luck with the safe part,” Tess said in a low voice.
They spent the next eight hours doglegging a course in preparation for their stealth run into Rhodian space. The biggest giveaway of a ship outside the regular transfer lanes was always the drive signature, followed by the heat output. Every time Maya burned after a course change to hurl Zephyr down a new trajectory, Tess altered the power curve of the drive. Finally, Maya and Decker were happy with the amount of navigational subterfuge and did a final course correction and acceleration burn that would take them into the general neighborhood of their drop-off coordinates. When they crossed over into Rhodian space a little while later, they were coasting ballistic, with the main drive shut down and the heat sinks retracted. It was the interplanetary equivalent of leaving one’s ID pass at home before walking the streets at night while wearing a mask. Anyone who spotted them would have no illusions about their intentions. But Zephyr was small and fast, difficult to see and harder still to chase down, and designed to be good at sneaking.
Coasting in stealth mode sounded exciting, but it was a major pain in the ass, Aden found. With their main drive off, they had momentum but no acceleration. Without acceleration, they had no gravity. The rest of the crew handled zero g like the experienced professionals they were. But Aden wasn’t a spacer, and he found that easy everyday tasks turned into difficult physics puzzles in zero g. He had to use the toilet with vacuum attachments to avoid floating around in the head with a big bubble of his own urine, and every time he sat or lay down anywhere, he had to strap in to stay in place.