Finders Keepers

by Linnea Sinclair

  The badges should respond to a small ping, keyed to a narrow frequency. At least, they’d been designed to do so, for emergency locate purposes.

  “Now.”

  A tiny beam of energy, almost imperceptible, cascaded through the ’Sko comm system.

  One ping. Two.

  He drew in a quick breath, read out the IDs. FRRMNV. DLPTRZ. Farra. Dallon. In the brig, as he thought.

  No Trilby.

  Where in hell was she?

  He looked at Dezi. “I’ve got Farra. Patruzius. Not Trilby.”

  “Perhaps her ship badge is defective?”

  Or they’d split them up, moved her to the other mother ship.

  Bloody fucking hell. That would make life a bit more difficult for a while.

  “Shall I send another pulse?”

  He studied the monitor. “No. Not yet.” There was a third option, one he preferred. She was on this ship, but not in the brig. The diagram before him was truncated. Lower decks. If Garold Grantforth was involved—and Rhis had no doubt he was—Trilby would be the one the ’Sko would deal with.

  She was, after all, ship’s captain. And should the ’Sko forget that fact, he also had no doubt his gutsy air sprite would be the first to remind them.

  Trilby sat at the long table in the conference room and tried not to look at the dark stains smeared across the remnants of the Quest’s nav station. She’d told Thren where the datafiles were stored, in a subunit on the bridge. But, perhaps intending to impress her with their efficiency, the ’Sko had hauled back not only the small subunit but most of the damned nav console as well. Its warped frame, complete with the dark splatters and smears that could only be Rhis’s blood, was propped along the far wall. Conduit and optic lines trailed across the decking. Monitors sagged in their cases. Keypads were buckled.

  But the stains were what she focused on.

  She wondered, briefly, painfully, what they’d done with his body. Maybe she could add that to her request list. A proper burial. The ’Sko, except for the Dakrahl, had no such traditions. A dead body was a dead body. They trampled over their own crew when they attacked the Quest’s bridge. Tossed the dead and the injured alike down the stairwell.

  Mitkanos’s body too. She’d ask for that as well. Bring them both to Avanar, bury them there. Rhis would be with her then, forever. In the large cave in the jungle where she first met him.

  She swiped at a tear trickling down her cheek, turned her attention back to the screen inset in the conference table. The Quest’s nav banks were scrambled in the attack, but she expected as much. Told Thren it would take a while to untangle them. A careful while. There were, she warned, fail-safes.

  She’d put them in herself.

  “I’ll need a destination directory, a large area of blank file space to start downloading to.” She pasted her most innocent, blank look on her face. The same one she always wore when she’d look at Conclave customs inspectors and ask, “What illegal cargo?”

  She saw Thren hesitate. She was asking for access to its ship’s computer banks, and the ’Sko knew it. It leaned back in its chair, at the far end of the table. The spiked ball lay motionless in front of it.

  “Why not old unit?” It pointed to the wreckage in the corner.

  “Because, number one, it’s damaged. Number two, that damage has severely limited its capacity. And number three, the files are larger than the remaining capacity. I could load them compressed, but then we’re risking major data corruption if I run out of space.”

  It was one of the few things she told Thren that was true. If it didn’t believe her, it could have its techs scan the unit.

  It had, she knew, two options. It could let her load directly to the ship’s computers. That’s what she wanted. Or it could wait, dig up a portable unit with sufficient capacity, and lock her out of the systems.

  She didn’t want that.

  She needed in to the ’Sko’s computers. In to their primaries. She was going to give them Herkoid’s star charts, suitably customized by the late Captain Khyrhis Tivahr. But she was also going to give them something else.

  Surprise.

  Thren chattered on intraship. High-pitched, grating Ycskrite noises answered back. Trilby waited, stared at her hands, at the tabletop, at the wide starfield through the circular viewport—anywhere but the broken nav console.

  They were moving on the sublight engines now, after one brief hyperspace jump. She didn’t recognize the stars, but then, ’Sko space was not her territory. Thren had requested Avanar’s coordinates. Evidently they had their own ways of getting into Gensiira.

  Carina’s presence on this ship proved as much.

  She had no idea why the ’Sko had kept Carina alive. Or Dallon and Farra, for that matter. Generosity and leniency were not words associated with the ’Sko. If they did something, it was because it benefited them, and only them, in some way.

  And when something no longer did, they were brutal. Ruthless.

  It was questionable whether the ’Sko would release them, leave them alive on Avanar. She felt they would only if they were sure—and once they saw the corrosive atmosphere of the jungles, who wouldn’t be?—that they’d never leave. Their survival would depend on whatever ship the ’Sko gave them as shelter. Even Shadow’s Quest would do. With the spare parts she’d accumulated over years of salvage and had carefully sealed and stored in the cavern, she knew she—with Dallon’s, Farra’s, and Carina’s help—could rebuild the Quest. Definitely get her comm pack working. Someone, sooner or later, would find them.

  But if the ’Sko didn’t, if they reneged on their agreement with her—

  It wouldn’t matter. Rhis was dead. But his handiwork, and hers, would live on forever in this ship’s systems, destroying it and, she knew, every other ’Sko ship it communicated with.

  Thren stood suddenly, shaking its long face side to side. “Chance? Chance. Trust. Need charts.” It walked down the length of the table, leaned over her screen. It inserted one finger into an ID slot, then stroked three lines of code that appeared.

  She watched the symbols flow by.

  Ycskrite! Damn it, it was all in Ycskrite. Bloodbat droppings, for all she knew.

  Thren pointed. “There.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t read your language. I need to work with binary addresses. That’s the only way I can get the charts to interface with your systems. At the binary level.”

  It spun around, slapped at the intership on the table, clacked out a long, angry-sounding sentence.

  Within minutes, the conference-room doors slid open. Another tall, thin, red-uniformed ’Sko hurried in. Its braid, a yellowish-green, bobbled.

  Thren screeched, clacked, screeched some more.

  The tech—Trilby assumed it was a tech—whined in response.

  Trilby shut it out, practiced saying good, better, best in Zafharish in her mind. Good, better, best. Good, better, best. She looked at Thren.

  Worm fodder.

  The tech wriggled its thin face, scurried toward her. It motioned her out of her seat, slid in when she vacated it. One finger in the side of the monitor, ID confirmed. Stroke, stroke, stroke.

  Second ID input. More stroking.

  Thren screeched.

  The tech looked startled. Stroked the screen faster.

  Trilby stood behind it, arms folded across her chest.

  And saw numbers. Lovely, beautiful, need-no-translation numbers.

  The tech screeched happily, looked at Thren.

  Thren looked at her. “Now? You do.”

  The tech stood, moved out of her way.

  Trilby sat. “Now. I do.”

  She began to slowly, methodically open and decode the charts. Deliberately, she chose the longest, most complex ones. Thren watched over her shoulder, and she hummed the tune to “good, better, best” while she worked.

  After a while Thren began to fidget, shifting from foot to foot. Then, a short walk to the viewport, look out, walk back, look down at the scree
n.

  Trilby continued her soft, hypnotic tune.

  “Done? Done?”

  She shot it the same look she’d bestowed on Rhis when they first met, clearly questioning his intelligence. Thren seemed to catch that, walked back to the viewport.

  Finally, it stalked back to its chair at the other end of the table, brought up another screen. She heard the screen beeping and chirping and didn’t know if Thren was busy with ship work or playing intergalactic poker. But it wasn’t, she knew, aware of what she was doing.

  Or what she was about to do.

  She moved files quickly now, tagged and hid two in a bogus directory. Then she looked for a routine file link, found it, and rode it to the mother ship’s main banks.

  Good, better, best!

  It took her a few minutes to find the primaries. She had to keep switching back to the star charts, unpacking into the ’Sko nav banks at the slowest possible rate.

  Then she had them, but there was something she needed to do first.

  “Thren?”

  It looked up. “Elli. Ot?”

  “Got a real old chart for you. Want to see it?”

  The thin face wobbled anxiously.

  “No, sit.” She waved one hand as he started to stand. “If I bring it up here, it’ll slow me down. I’ll send it to you. What’s your terminal ID code?”

  It took her a few more questions, and screeching translations, to get from Thren what she wanted. Its personal ship link. She keyed it in, tagged it worm fodder.

  She sent it a chart showing a multitude of hidden jumpgates in and around Lissade. Big money, that. She knew that would keep it drooling for a while.

  If ’Sko drooled.

  A hissing sound came from its mouth as it stared at the screen. Probably the ’Sko’s way of denoting pleasure.

  Always knew the lot of them were full of hot air.

  She went back to her screen, pulled up the primaries. And saw at the top of the file something she never thought she’d see again.

  Yav chera.

  Her hand trembled as she reached out and touched the words on the screen.

  Yav chera.

  It wasn’t a hallucination.

  She glanced quickly at Thren. It was hissing, its yellowed eyes transfixed on the screen.

  Her heart pounded. She moved her hands to the keypad and for a moment her fingers fumbled, her skin slick. She wiped one hand down her pants leg, started again.

  Yav cheron, Khyrhis-chevo.

  A line appeared immediately after it: Dasjankira. Trilby-chenka.

  Her breath was coming in short, rapid gasps. She didn’t believe in specters. Had Rhis keyed something into his programs on board Shadow’s Quest to tease her? As a joke? Was this nothing more than an A-I interactive program, unfolding for amusement?

  She keyed in a sentence an A-I might not be programmed to respond to. Something Rhis couldn’t have anticipated. Carina’s here.

  Nothing. So it was a program. Her input wasn’t part of its response loop. Her spirits sagged.

  Bloody hell. Where?

  She stifled a whimper of joy.

  Brig. Dallon, Farra too.

  Confirmed. I have Uncle Yavo.

  Yavo? Alive?

  Grumpy as usual.

  She wanted to clap her hands, stand up, and cheer. Where are you?

  Coming through your back door in about five minutes. Shall you finish scrambling their primaries, or shall I?

  Gods. She had a sudden understanding of what had been going on, though it was beyond comprehension. Somehow, Rhis was alive. And on board and probably crawling around in the maintenance tunnels, looking for a data-access panel. Found a data-access panel. Found her doing the same thing. Duplicate efforts.

  She had to trust he was armed. She wasn’t. Let him concentrate then on that aspect. She could do hers.

  I’m in the mood to scramble, she told him.

  Good. I’m in the mood to kill.

  He was definitely armed. And very pissed off.

  She accessed the primaries, her hands shaking, called up the two hidden files, coded them to Thren’s ID. Then she closed the primary and skipped down to the system’s backups, threw in an answering parameter.

  Back to the main primary. She scanned for a sequence of numbers Rhis had taught her to look for. They were further apart than she anticipated. She’d have to create bridges.

  Bloody hell.

  Five minutes, Rhis said. She had five minutes to disable the ’Sko control of the ship. She couldn’t write all those bridges in that time.

  But she didn’t have to. Sproings. Shadow called them sproings because that’s the sound he said they’d make when they jumped, replicated, and jumped again.

  She could create a bridge, sproing it, and let it go on its way.

  Damnation! This was almost fun.

  Thren’s nasal voice disturbed her. “Good! This is good!” It pointed to its screen.

  No, you motherless son of a Pillorian bitch. This is best.

  Her screen flickered briefly. Thren’s head jerked up, its eyes wary, cautious.

  “Oops,” she said. “Really big chart. Total overlay of the Conclave. Sorry. Maybe I should delete it—”

  “Total? Total? One chart? All Conclave?”

  “Yeah, but it’s unpacking too fast. It’s going to drain your system resources for a while unless you shut something down.”

  “Tell!”

  She glanced at the screen. “Closest resource is mechanical. Can you shut down the ship’s lifts for two minutes?”

  A screeching translation. Thren barked into the intraship unit. “Two minutes,” it told Trilby. “No more.”

  She smiled. Touched a key. Impenetrable blast doors—“airtights”—groaned into operation. And locked down every deck on the ship.

  Except for a code only she and Rhis knew.

  Good. Better. Best.

  29

  Rhis was sliding through a maintenance panel on bridge deck when he heard the airtights grind into action. She’d done it. His air sprite was in the primaries, controlling all functions of the ship.

  Every deck would be partitioned, sealed. Lifts inoperative. ’Sko crew would be trapped in their sections.

  And he could let the air out, a section at a time or whole decks at once. It was his, and Trilby’s, to control. He grabbed Dezi’s hard shoulder. “Come on.” The wide blue doors of the conference room were just ahead.

  A noise behind them, a clacking screech. He turned, both rifles at hip level, firing. The ’Sko’s body jerked, fell. Another appeared through a doorway, just opening as his laser fire burned down the corridor. He shot it in the head.

  “Move!” he ordered Dezi, and sprinted toward the conference room.

  Dezi’s loping steps followed.

  Rhis stopped at the side of the blue doorway, rifles raised against his shoulders. “Code in.”

  Dezi inserted a metal finger in the wall panel. The doors slid open and Rhis heard two sounds simultaneously.

  One was an annoying, clacking screech.

  The other was a woman’s voice that was the sweetest he’d ever heard. “Dezi!”

  And he knew, from the sounds, exactly where each was.

  He stepped in, rifles spitting white streaks of death.

  The tall ’Sko was caught halfway out of its seat. Bolts of energy impacted against its chest, its shoulders, its head. Dark blotches exploded over its red uniform. Its face skewed, its green-tinged braid whipped up and, for a moment, seemed to stand straight over its head.

  Then its body arched backward and tumbled, crookedly, over the arm of the chair.

  Then, and only then, did Rhis permit himself to look at Trilby. She’d dropped into a defensive crouch behind her chair, a protective posture that would make any Stegzarda major proud.

  Or Imperial Fleet senior captain.

  “I am,” he told her as she rose, “a lot better shot than you’re giving me credit for.”

  She ran toward him and
threw herself against his chest, her arms wrapping tightly around his neck. He let the rifles fall on their straps, closed his own arms around her. He held her tightly and managed to bark out, “Lock the damned door!” to Dezi.

  She was sobbing, laughing, kissing him.

  His hands framed her face and for a very long moment he stared at her, drinking in every sparkle in her eyes, every soft curve of her lips, every sooty shadow of her lashes. Every tear glistening down her cheeks.

  She trembled under his touch.

  He whispered her name. “Trilby-chenka. You have my heart.”

  Then he kissed her, letting passion explode like a star going nova, searing her, branding her with everything he felt. Everything he was.

  Everything he wasn’t.

  “Khyrhis. Khyrhis.” She was crying, softly murmuring his name into his mouth.

  He clasped her against his chest, his fingers threaded through her moonlit hair, and he held her, held her. Held her.

  He squeezed his eyes shut.

  She wasn’t the only one trembling.

  He let out a long, slow breath. “Trilby-chenka. We still have work to do.”

  She nodded, backed away from him, wiped her hands down her face. But when she looked back up, she was grinning.

  He saw the screen at the far end of the table where she’d crouched, pointed to it. “You’ve got access from there?”

  She nodded but was already turning away from him, reaching for Dezi. The ’droid took her outstretched hand, pumped it in a hearty handshake. “It’s very good to see you again, Captain Elliot.”

  Rhis slid into the seat in front of the screen just as Trilby grabbed Dezi in a hug. Then she was behind him, still sniffling, one hand on his shoulder.

  He tapped at the screen. “You excluded the brig. Good. This hangar bay too. Or Uncle Yavo will be most upset.”

  “I didn’t know where the Quest was.”

  “Not to worry. I’ve got it.” He looked over the top of the screen, at the slumped form at the end of the table. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Thren something. Or something Thren.”

  Thren? His mind played with the name as he shut down enviro, deck by deck. The ’Sko should be feeling extremely woozy right about—

  Thren. “Kalthrencadri?”

  “Something like that, yes.”