Finally, the clang of the docking grapple engaging was heard, and the airlock cycle light went from red to green. “Atmosphere on the other side of the lock. Everyone, stay sharp and don’t open your faceplates until we have an all-clear to do so.”
Kellie nodded to Veronica, “Don’t need to tell me twice–or really, even once, but it’s good to hear the boss has the right idea.”
Louis simply nodded his agreement.
The airlock door cycled and Veronica walked into the other ship’s entrance antechamber. There was no one to be found immediately, but plenty of evidence that the crew was about. “Stay sharp, people. We could run out of room real fast. And make sure we’re not going to suffer any surprises from behind.”
With an increasing sense of unreality, Veronica Gray and Kellie Alyse made their way down the companionway of the blockade runner. There had been two resentful-looking crewers tending an unconscious officer as they had entered, but there was no other sign of life in the entire ship. “This thing’s gotta be at least a century old, they haven’t made D-42s since the late-third century.”
“The manifest just says, ‘two hundred thousand kilograms agricultural,’” said Bowman over the intersuit comm. He would shortly split off from them to reach the auxiliary control center, to program in a deceleration burn that would bring the ship to a halt relative to system primary. “That seems a little bit… bizarrely blank. And how do you need a ship this big for a measly two-hundred-ton cargo?”
Veronica shuddered. “With a manifest that vague, plus the heat-source and cargo-dump we saw earlier, it’s drugs or slaves. There’s maybe a handful of other options, but most of ‘em are overly naïve for this part of the galaxy.”
“We’ll certainly find out by the time we reach the hold, Ma’am,” replied Kellie. She and Veronica traded a grimly meaningful look.
“Bowman, I want you to stay in the auxiliary control room. You can monitor us from there and let us know if there’s anything coming our way that we need to know about.” Veronica reflexively rewrapped her hands around the control sticks inside the suit’s arms; mimicking her movement the suit’s hands also flexed and clenched.
“Aye-aye, Ma’am.” Louis seemed to be relieved enough that he wasn’t being asked to look into the darkness of a possible slave ship’s belly, and Veronica was glad to give the young Astronaut First Class a chance to do something without being there.
“Why didn’t somebody tell me when I was that young that there were things it was ok to opt out of experiencing,” she muttered.
Neither Kellie, nor any of her shipmates listening in over the comm channel had the answer to Veronica’s question.
Veronica shook her head to clear it. She was not a neglected ten year old now, she was a Naval officer in command of a corvette, and she had a job to do. Dammit. “Let’s get ourselves down to the hold, so we can see exactly how hard we’re going to kick the asses of the guys who were running this damn show when we find them.”
The ship was disturbingly quiet. With Two-Oh-Seven held to its back by dint of her docking clamps and both ships’ thrusters offline, there was very little sound that the two could hear in their transducers other than the slight rattles and moans of a starship in deep-space flight. The two women fanned out to different parts of the cargo deck, each quietly intoning her observations for the record as she moved. Two decks below, Louis Bowman had gotten himself comfortably ensconced in the ship’s auxiliary control center. The faded-white corridor walls were almost comforting in their blankness, despite the horrors his imagination envisioned.
“Lieutenant Gray,” came Bowman’s voice over Veronica’s headset, “Bowman here in auxiliary control room. I’ve got the internal master display up on the screen in front of me. I’m reading movement in Holds 1, 2 and 3. Hold 4 appears to have been holed from outside and again from the inside, airtight doors are shut and holding but I’m seeing neither movement nor life signs in there.” Veronica laughed bitterly while her skin crawled; vacuum asphyxiation was one of every spacer’s worst nightmares. At least it was a brief nightmare–total oxygen starvation would render one unconscious at ten seconds and kill within minute.
Ironically, the cargo dump had probably not been intentional, just extraordinarily poor luck on the part of the runner. If she hadn’t seen the O2 bloom, she might not even have paid this ship any mind at all–just another cargo freighter plying the outer systems of the Alliance.
Veronica placed a seismic detector on the wall of Hold 4. It was nothing more than an expensive canister holding a shotgun shell and a heavy metal cup for the slug to blast into. She triggered the shell and a moment later, a resounding bang reverberated through the hold’s metallic walls, measuring its contents. “Scanning, interpolating… shit. There’s five human bodies in there, all the temperature of the hull metal. Maybe a sixth if the gravity failed the way the force field did. By the cloud of debris I’d guess there were somewhere in the neighborhood of three standard shipping containers and probably eight stevedores before the hold blew and the skipper of this thing sealed it off. I think we’ll leave that intact for the Judge Advocate General’s office to look at, no need to open it.” She swallowed a foul lump in her throat anyway.
Kellie walked over to the hatchway to hold number three. “Give me a couple minutes, Skipper, and I’ll have this door. You’ll want to back me up so whoever’s in there doesn’t get any bright ideas.”
About a minute and a half later, her suit’s onboard combinatorics engine had found the access code for the cargo hold.
“Hold your breath, people,” she said, “here we go.”
Chapter 7
For someone who was still officially only trying to rescue people potentially trapped in a crippled spaceship, thought Chief Kellie Alyse, she was getting a decidedly less than friendly reception from the crew of the merchant starship Arrant Knave was decidedly less than friendly. It confirmed that they were smugglers, and newbies to the trade at that. Professional smugglers always played nice when caught, whether angling to get the drop on you or cooperating in the hope of a plea bargain.
“I can’t help you if you don’t help me,” she muttered, low enough that her audio pickups wouldn’t faithfully relay it to the world outside and the roustabouts and crew members eyeing her suit.
Suspicious, angry faces looked askance at her from every angle. “I’m Chief Petty Officer Alyse of the Interstellar Navy. Can someone tell me who’s in charge?”
“Why do you wanna know?” came the voice of a burly woman with short, spiky blonde hair. She was standing next to an equally burly man, each of them wielding pipe wrenches.
One or two people in the hold looked back at her, but the majority seemed to be ignoring her, or even outright surly. A couple more roustabouts held prybars, looking as though they wanted an excuse to use them. If they did, it would be a mistake with drastic consequences–the Cache power suit wasn’t totally invulnerable, but she wasn’t going to lose a hand-to-hand fight against improvised melee weapons while wearing armor that could literally crush a tank. And even if they disabled the armor, Kellie was much stronger than she looked.
“Grey, I think you had better get your ass in here.”
Veronica carefully walked through the hatch, looking carefully around the room. She carefully kept the barrels of her forearm guns pointed toward the floor, but the rage seemed to build, especially among the men in the room.
“Why should we listen to you, anyway? What are we going to get if we follow your instructions, anyway?”
Another shouted, “Cooperation doesn’t make your jail cell any more comfortable, squid-shit.” There were other men coming behind him, and things were getting more out of control.
There was the crash of a gunshot and a strangled cry of surprise coming from behind Kellie. Veronica reached up with her glove to check the sudden carbon score on her faceplate, and a roustabout frantically worked the hammer on an old-style revolver, re-aiming. His second shot went wide as the petty chief
’s power armor lunged forward with fluid grace and neatly slapped his gun aside, the trigger guard snapping his finger like a matchstick.
“The next person who fires a gun will lose the arm holding the weapon, not just the weapon itself.” growled Kellie.
That got their attention, thought Veronica, resisting the urge to massage her suddenly-aching temples. The bullet hadn’t penetrated, but the momentum had still carried through her helmet. Her head was aching, and she felt like she wanted to be sick–even the transferred shock of a frangible round hitting her helmet was enough to make her head ring. The remainder of the roustabouts were cowed, at least for the moment, by the sudden violence. Probably as much by the thunderclap of the firearm as by the actual retaliation; firing an unsuppressed firearm in an enclosed compartment without ear protection was almost as bad as setting off an actual flash-bang. Kellie was moving carefully between the crew members, looking at their visual tags. “For the biggest no-brainer in the history of the galaxy, Captain, they’re scared as hell.”
Veronica motioned her away from the crew. “Well that much is obvious, Chief. I’m a little surprised at the condition of the ship, given that a meteor apparently passed through its #4 hold. As badly off as she is, I’d have expected a catastrophic failure a long time before we even saw her.”
Kellie shook her head. “It’s a pretty common state for ships like this. You get a few payments behind, and soon you’re eating beans from a tin to make ends meet until you can get your ship caught up on its maintenance–which of course it never does.”
“That sounds a lot like the voice of experience.”
“Once upon a time before I joined the service, I had my own independent shipping company.” Alyse demurred. “Things got pretty thin a time or two.”
“Captain, this is Yeboah on Two-oh-Seven.” Veronica winced suddenly at the interruption. “I’m getting a squawk back from Four on the Floor. They were searching through the wreckage of the blowout. There was one intermodal container present, its hatch was blown off by venting air. There were two corpses, including one in a skinsuit, decapitated by the detached hatch. And a cloud of organic debris that was probably a corpse before it was mashed by a loose cargo container.”
Veronica winced, “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too, Ma’am. Commander Saitova is heading this way to rendezvous, but she won’t be here until tomorrow; our instructions are to make ready for her arrival to cover us with additional personnel.”
“Understood, Sub-lieutenant. In the meantime, we’ll continue to do our investigative work here. I’m going to pretty much assume that the whole remaining crew of this ship are joint owner-operators and probably best friends with the captain.”
What Veronica left unsaid was that figuring out the captain’s identity was going to be a stone bitch and a half, since he or she was going to be legally responsible for this entire damned mess and had every reason to hide.
“There is really no rest for the wicked, is there, Chief Alyse?”
“No, Ma’am, there isn’t.” Kellie leaned against the doorframe with exaggerated casualness.
“… Of all the times I want you to disagree with me, you have to choose this exact moment to agree.” Veronica leaned her head forward against the bulkhead.
“Yes Ma’am.”
Chapter 8
Kellie picked up and sifted through cakes of compacted Alluvian silver. The stuff was fully processed and even already diluted down to street potency–nobody could even begin to claim that this was anything but a recreational drug. And the crew clearly knew all about it, given that the containers were scattered throughout the holds and covered with other cargo to try to make them less obvious.
“Here too?” Veronica’s eyes formed an unspoken question.
Kellie shook her head angrily. “This is enough drugs to coat a city pretty liberally. Whoever’s shipping this stuff, it looks like they’re planning to set themselves up as some sort of kingpin. No sign that the crew’s been dipping into their own snuff, though. Whatever their other faults, they’re not addicts.”
Veronica’s mouth compressed to a fine line. “The rest of the crew, I’m guessing they’re hiding among the cargo in the holds. It’s a dumb smuggler or a desperate one who takes contraband cargo in brim-filled intermodal cargo containers, or an arrogant one. We don’t have enough people to do a full sweep of the ship, not and keep someone on Two-Oh-Seven to keep sensor watch. We’ve got twenty-one hours before Four on the Floor finishes her sweep and doubles back to rendezvous with us.”
“Do you think they’re going to come out and try to take back the ship?”
“Probably. According to Alyssa, their manifest has their destination at Inari D, so they might think they have a fair shot if they manage to get the drop on us–it’s only thirty light-years away.”
As the two trooped off down the corridor, Ress’ face developed a sneer. These Alliance spacers were getting too close, dammit. He was lucky that the crew was so loyal; nobody would willingly give away that he was the captain, and the Alliance had banned giving captured smugglers the third degree.
The Alliance military didn’t know how much contempt smugglers held it in. They probably had an idea, but they certainly didn’t know.
Ress wondered if Duke Ifrit was trying to get a load of hot cargo away from his property and out of his hands. What mattered was the cash, and Duke Ifrit’s cash was as good as anyone else’s, now that Ress was away from Maraway. If, of course, the man survived to transfer the property to its destination and tell about it.
Ress looked around at his crewmen. He’d been patiently winning back their respect ever since they took the damn cargo on board, only to have it swept away in an instant by the damn Navy. They resented their position, they resented the loss of their buddies, and they no doubt were quickly deciding that both of them were the fault of their abrasive captain’s preference for negotiating and his aversion to leaving money on the table.
The problem was that potential employers also hated leaving money on the table, so he often ended up leaving jobs on the table when his employers left it. And if it had been hard for his crew to ignore that fact when things were merely stretched thin, how much more when staring down the barrels of Navy guns?
The last two flights of the Arrant Knave hadn’t even really been runs, exactly–they’d had a little cargo in them, but mostly they were moves from one planet to another to try to find paying work.
Mattingly looked at him with poorly disguised irritation. “This is another fine mess, Jonah. We all try not to judge your tendencies with us. You’ve always been straight, honest, and correct. But there’s just this… complete lack, where your tact is, and right now? We’re not in a good spot.”
“I know, Matt, and I’m going to try to get us out of this, any way I can. I haven’t given up on the idea of getting the Navy to pull up stakes and go home, though I’ve got no idea how I’m gonna manage that at this late a date. That captain of theirs gives me the shivers.”
“She’s got an intense glare, doesn’t she,” piped up Erwin Bates, a dark-skinned engineer, “I feel like I can’t get away with anything around her.”
Jerry Laures was whimpering on the floor, cradling his hand and his rapidly-swelling index finger. It was definitely broken, and Megan Keys, his wife, was getting the first aid kit from out the wall safe.
“Laures,” said Ress, “Why’d you have to go and shoot at powered armor?”
The man was too focused on his wounded paw to answer. Laures had always been something of a shoot first and think later type of operator, and his wife seemed to work on the same wavelength. On the other hand, Megan wasn’t exactly jumping up to try to wrap a crowbar around those Navy assholes’ craniums–not that it would do any particular amount of good against those helmets of theirs. The frangible round had splashed right off of it, though he suspected that something heavier might have actually punched through.
It was just their damn luck to have been passi
ng through a star system at the same time that a Navy carrier was dropping fighters– they’d watched the spatial distortion move through the system and tried their hardest to avoid it, but keeping ahead of the deployment wave would have required suspicious amounts of speed on their path out of the system. Keeping a low profile had seemed like the smarter option until they were hit.
Mattingly grumbled, “Is that damn blonde trying to be a pain in the ass, or does it just come naturally to Navy women?”
Ress looked at him and rolled his eyes. “Matt,” he said, “You know the answer to that question. Of course Navy women are a pain in the ass; hell, you dated one for ten years.” That had been another, long-ago portion of both Ress’ and Mattingly’s lives–a time when they both had been willing to be law-abiding citizens and to a certain extent even productive in a traditional way. They’d even both been part of a navy at one point–granted, the Triangle Republic Navy was often little better than the pirates and smugglers they claimed to police, but they were still a navy, and they still had the galaxy’s sixth largest force of battleships (obsolescent though the average example of the type was). But that time had gone away a long time ago, and both of their lives had followed a different path since then.
Trying to keep their ships and bodies together had started to drag to an inevitably dark conclusion in the last few years, as business had dried up following a new set of shipping regs that had legitimized much of the illicit trade that smaller operators quietly depended on. Despite the odd contraband contract, Ress had been mostly legit for most of his spacing career. It wasn’t anything anyone else hadn’t done–look away when a suspiciously light load of “medicine” was being passed to him, don’t open that crate of machine parts bound for a planet in revolution, that sort of thing. Knowingly taking on contraband was something they’d only resorted to in the last year. We had no choice, dammit!
Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) Page 6