by Becky Black
"I hope not, but it's best to be prepared. Let's go."
They had landed on an airfield right on the former military supply base and the number of humans they saw as they walked towards the storage depots on the base surprised Maiga.
"More people here than I expected," she said.
"I guess they've started to band together for safety." Wixa looked around at them too. "And maybe buy transport elsewhere. Hey, we could take a passenger."
"I don't think so." Maiga cased the area as they walked, her old habits still deeply ingrained. Some of the buildings, that once held weapons and other military supplies, now housed people. Most of them wore a combination of their old military uniforms and civilian clothes and all of them wore tense looks, even here, surrounded by their fellow humans. They gave the sky nervous glances, waiting for death to drop out of it.
Some buildings weren't converted to barracks. One that looked like it might once have been a guardhouse was now a bar. Music and laughter poured out as they passed. Warm lights glowed in the dimness as night began to fall.
"Let's have a drink after we make the deal," Wixa suggested.
"We can have a drink back on the station."
"True. But, coffee isn't the only valuable commodity we could pick up around here. I'll bet the locals have all kinds of gossip that hasn't reached Hollow Jimmy yet."
That was a good point. And Wixa wasn't the only one who wanted to pick up gossip.
"Okay. After we make the deal."
~o~
Two years ago if Maiga had caught a quartermaster selling military supplies for his own profit, she'd have shot him herself.
That was a long time ago. Before her life changed. Before she'd opened the door of what was meant to be an empty storage room, and found the two stowaways hiding there. Before Ilyan had stood up, smiled at her, and said, "I suppose I should explain."
Now she stood behind Wixa, the rifle cradled, while Wixa negotiated with an ex-quartermaster for the sixty crates of coffee beans. Naturally, he wanted to charge a higher price than the one he'd agreed before they left Hollow Jimmy. Wixa naturally wanted to pay a lower price and the two haggled and argued fiercely.
Maiga ignored the negotiation. Wixa could handle that better than she could. She watched the quartermaster's guards. Big, young guys, heavily muscled, a couple of grunts for sure. They stood at the door through to the warehouse, where the coffee and who knows what other goods lay. One of them nodded to Maiga when he caught her eye. An acknowledgement that we're all just doing our jobs here and nobody wants any trouble.
At last, Wixa and the quartermaster settled on a price and shook on it. He stood up, revealing that he'd let his personal discipline slip a bit and had started to develop a paunch he'd never have got away with in the old days. In a few months he'd be a fat, sleek merchant of the kind Maiga had read about it ancient stories and seen on Hollow Jimmy.
"Come on then." He waved a hand at the door his men guarded. "Through here."
They followed him into the warehouse, where stacks of crates loomed from shelving units in the dim light. Now and again, a faint whiff of decay wafted by as they passed. Perishables he hadn't managed to move soon enough.
However, their coffee beans, vacuum-sealed in clear plastic crates, were fine. Wixa inspected them, bluffing that she knew what she was doing.
"The price includes transporting them to our ship?" She asked.
"Sure. And I'll loan you a couple of strapping lads to load it, thrown in." He grinned. "Just for the pleasure of doing business with you lovely ladies."
Maiga frowned when Wixa laughed and gave him a friendly slap on the arm. Watch it. Infantry types didn't take much encouraging.
"Okay, lads," the quartermaster said to his men. "Let's get it loaded."
When they had a truck loaded with the coffee beans, Maiga and Wixa sat in the back perched on the crates, while the ‘strapping lads' drove them to the airfield. The lads started heaving the crates into the hold, stacking them up a little haphazardly for Maiga's liking. She pushed them into neat rows and strapped them down to the moorings on the floor and walls.
Wixa ‘supervised', which to Maiga's eyes meant ogling the muscular young men and exchanging flirtatious banter. Careful, careful, careful. We're alone out here. Vulnerable. There was no higher authority any more. Nobody to complain to if anybody gets… cheeky.
Once the truck was empty and the hold full, the lads drove off. Maiga and Wixa closed up the cargo hatch that acted as a ramp when open, and made a final check that the crates were all secured.
"Right," Wixa said, "let's get that drink. And some food. Something fresh."
Maiga felt less keen now. Night blanketed the base, the airfield especially black. Lights twinkled from the buildings, and though they looked inviting, the walk to them didn't. But she still had the rifle. Anyway, they were all humans here.
So they walked through the darkness, back to the buildings. The scent of cooking drifted on the night air and that changed Maiga's mind. Three days of eating the reheated or reconstituted meals that were all the Friss's limited cooking facilities allowed for had left them both hungry for some real food. Roasted, fried, sautéed… anything but reheated.
They found what had once had been the officer's mess and was now an eatery. Less lively than the bar they'd passed, which suited Maiga just fine. Old habits again. There may be nobody to enforce it, but the officers and other ranks division persisted. She slung her rifle on her back and followed Wixa inside.
Men and women sat around the long communal tables, talking, eating and drinking, but nobody was drunk or raucous. Maiga and Wixa got curious looks and a few polite nods as they went in.
They bought drinks and food at the counter and sat at one of the long tables. The communal dining meant they could join some of the other patrons, without seeming to intrude. They could listen to them, without obvious eavesdropping, and could quite naturally become part of their conversation.
"Did you just arrive?" A young woman lieutenant asked Maiga when passing her the salt from down the table. She wore a Marine Corps jacket, the insignia still on it.
One of my lot, Maiga thought and smiled at the girl. "Just passing through."
"Doing some trading," Wixa said. "Then we're heading back home to Hollow Jimmy." That generated some interest, as the others at the table started swapping tales of outrageous adventures while on leave on Hollow Jimmy. Some added that they were thinking of heading there, for safety.
"The Klaff don't let military ships anywhere in the sector," Wixa said, answering a question from one of them. "Though the Muaan Qacia patrols the sector border, and they sometimes harass any human owned ships crossing it."
"Damn lizards," a man said, scowling. A murmur of agreement went around the table.
"But, the Big Four know that the Klaff could cripple them with economic sanctions if they disrupt trade," Wixa went on. "So, yeah, it is a safe haven for us."
Maiga stayed quiet for most of the chat, but when the conversation stilled for a moment she spoke up.
"Have any of you heard about this fleet of surviving ships?"
Wixa gave Maiga a surprised look, which seemed to turn to worry a moment later. What's her problem? It's not a sensitive topic, is it?
"Yeah," a small man, with a deeper voice than he looked like he should have, nodded. His clothes were those of a starship officer, though his insignia was gone. "Last I heard they were in the Aflan system. Somebody said a transport ship went down on a moon there, during the fighting. But with a lot of survivors."
Aflan. Maiga's heart sank. That was a long way. For her little ship to reach Aflan would take months. She'd been prepared for a long journey, but not that long, especially not in such a small, vulnerable ship. And the fleet wouldn't be sitting there waiting for her. They'd be moving on, maybe even further away.
"You know," the marine lieutenant said, "I've heard they don't have a commander running that fleet, but some kind of… group leadership. And the people in the shi
ps, they vote for them." Her voice was tinged with amazement.
"Ruling Committee," the deep-voiced officer said. "Or just the Committee. That's what I've heard they're called."
"Weird," someone else muttered.
"They must be heading to Hollow Jimmy at some point," Maiga said, "I mean if they're looking for humans, there are a lot of us there."
Shrugs and mutters of assent came from the other officers. They agreed. But it could be a long time, Maiga thought. Such a long time.
"If you're from H.J. then you must have heard about the Trebuchet."
Maiga looked up. A young man had spoken. His clothes were all civilian, impossible to say what service branch he might have been in.
"The Trebuchet?" Maiga didn't know what he meant. A ship perhaps?
"You mean Bara?" Wixa said.
"Who?" Maiga asked.
"The Trebuchet's a surviving ship," the young man said. "Supposed to be captained by an officer named Bara." His voice hushed as he spoke, the others leaned in closer, hanging on his words. "I've heard the story that even though the Chia caught the ship and ripped its weapons out, somehow they got hold of new ones, and started going after Big Four ships."
"I've heard of her," Wixa said. "Operating near the Klaff's sector." She shrugged. "She won't last long. The lizards will hunt her down and they won't just rip out the guns."
"Well, I hope she takes a good few of the bastards with her before that happens," the young marine said. This time the rest of the table didn't murmur their agreement. They almost cheered.
But Wixa shrugged, not as impressed. "Just a pirate," she said. "She won't last long. Just another pirate."
Chapter 3
Maiga had the cockpit to herself, Wixa back in the sleeping quarters. The ship was on automatic, but the chairs here in the cockpit were more comfortable than the ones in the living quarters. Anyway, it felt good to watch the stars. With the lights off and the consoles mostly dark, she could almost imagine herself looking up at a night sky from a planet. From Earth.
Over the last six months, she'd tried to think about Earth, and the billions of her fellow humans who had died. Somehow, it wouldn't sink in to her mind. She could think about her dead friends, and Ilyan, and mourn them, but she didn't know how to mourn for a whole world. Perhaps she had never understood loyalty the way she should have.
Anger too. She didn't seem to get that right either. All her anger was directed at those who had betrayed her and the people she loved. High Command. Tesla. Her fists clenched at the thought of them. But the Big Four? She feared them as a threat, but she had none of the thirst for revenge she saw in the eyes of so many other humans.
Had she ever been loyal to anyone but her unit? They taught you at school that you owed you loyalty to High Command. So what happened when High Command betrayed you? Who could you be loyal to then? When you had no family, no tribe, no country, no religion? All you had was your unit and your friends.
All gone.
She still avoided a certain part of the marketplace on Hollow Jimmy. The part near to the alleyway where Rin's body had been dumped. She had been there once though. Some discreet probing of the station's security force's computers had given her the details. The murder case was still open. When she knew the location of the byway where the body had been found, she'd gone there and… Well, she'd stood around feeling awkward and foolish for a while, and realised his face had started to fade from her memory.
So she preferred to stay away now. Not because it felt painful to go there, but because it didn't. And that made her ashamed.
Behind her, the door slid open, spilling light into the cockpit. Maiga glanced back to see Wixa outlined in the doorway, holding a couple of steaming mugs. More coffee.
"I just had the strangest dream."
Oh great, she likes to relate her dreams to people.
"Yeah?" Polite, but not encouraging. Nevertheless, Wixa sat down and handed Maiga a mug, which turned out to be tea and not coffee.
"It's sitting on top of all those coffee beans. I can smell them through the air vents."
"No you can't. They're sealed in airtight crates."
"I swear, I can smell them. That's what made me have my dream."
I'm not asking her about the dream. I'm not.
"So, in the dream," Wixa said. "I'm swimming in a lake. It's a huge lake, I mean almost as far as the eye can see. But it wasn't water. You know what it was?"
"Amaze me."
"Coffee! A huge lake of coffee!"
"Imagine my surprise."
Wixa laughed. "Yeah, who'd have thought it? Me, dreaming about coffee. Anyway, I'm swimming in this lake and trying to get to the shore, but I start to get really tired and frightened that I'm going to drown."
"What a way to go," Maiga rolled her eyes.
"Hey, as much as I like my coffee I prefer not to inhale it. So I'm having trouble keeping my head out of the water--coffee--and it keeps getting in my mouth, and it's really good coffee, so I start drinking it."
"Oh, don't tell me, you escaped by drinking the entire lake of coffee?" Maiga looked down at her mug. "No wonder we're drinking tea."
"No!" Wixa protested. "That would be silly! And you know, I'm only one small woman. If I'd kept drinking all that coffee I'd soon be swimming in something much less pleasant, if you know what I mean."
Maiga sighed. She was going to get the whole dream. She couldn't escape, could she? Thirty-nine more hours on this ship before they got back to the station. "Go on then, I'll bite. What happened next?"
"Well, because I was drinking the coffee I started getting really buzzed, and I started swimming, even though it was a really long way to the shore. I just kept drinking and swimming and swimming and drinking, until at last I climbed up onto dry land."
"Which was made of chocolate?"
Wixa laughed. "I wish. No, I stood there and looked out across this lake, all the miles and miles of coffee, almost as far as the eye could see. And you know what I did then?"
"I can't imagine."
"Jumped back in and started swimming to the other side, of course."
~o~
"How much longer?" Maiga asked.
"Stand by," came the same answer from traffic control. Maiga sat back, sighing. They'd been stuck out here almost an hour waiting for control to allocate them a berth and give them permission to dock. Wixa sat beside her in the cockpit and tapped away at the control panel, making good use of the time, setting up deals.
"I've got buyers for forty seven of the crates," she announced. "The last thirteen we'll easily offload to the mobile vendors."
Well at least she had been making good use of the time.
"We'll need some help unloading and distributing the crates," Maiga said.
"Easy. Lots of boys standing around idle looking for some casual work. Won't cost us more than a couple of hundred credits."
"You've thought this through," Maiga said, impressed by Wixa's attention to detail.
"That's what you have to do, because it's unexpected expenses that eat into profit margins."
"Maybe you should do this more often," Maiga said. "Get a ship and go into business properly. You seem to have a knack for trading."
Wixa nodded, her face quite serious. "I've been a trader for years, in information. Hollow Jimmy is information central, and I have a knack for picking it up."
She doesn't just mean gossip in bars, Maiga thought, thinking of the way she'd been working the console, like a musical instrument. She was probably an ex-intelligence operative, a technical specialist. Maiga was a good tech herself, had become an even better one, by necessity while on the run. She could spot a colleague.
"But right now information about supplies is some of the most valuable information there is," Wixa went on. "I could just sell that information I suppose." She shrugged as she spoke, sounding as if that bored her. Then she smiled, a sly look. "And why buy a ship, when this is a perfectly good one?"
"Wixa…" Damn, she felt temp
ted, she really did. A few more trips like this one and her capital could grow to a really nice sum. Right now, once she bought her supplies she'd have very little cash left. And if the "Committee" fleet was as far away as the rumours said, she'd need to refuel more times than she'd planned.
And was the trip even necessary? She'd said it herself; the Committee had to come to Hollow Jimmy eventually. Why go looking for them? Why not just wait here for them to arrive? But her other reasons for leaving hadn't changed; more people arriving all the time, her fear of being recognised.
Some people blamed Ilyan for what happened. Others almost worshipped him, called him The Prophet. The latter could make her life just as tricky as the former. She wasn't ashamed of her involvement with Ilyan and she certainly didn't hold him responsible for the way things played out. But she didn't want to be reminded about it every day. She just wanted to be left alone.
Of course, if she did become a trader, she'd be off the station a lot, moving around, so the chances of someone on the station recognising her grew smaller. She didn't necessarily have to leave permanently. She just had to leave often.
"Courier Friss, permission to dock, berth four one zero."
Maiga smiled at the voice of the traffic controller. She turned back to look at Wixa, who still watched her, speculatively, waiting for an answer.
"I'll think about it."
~o~
She had plenty of time to think about it as they supervised the deliveries of the crates to the various businesses. It took several hours to get them all distributed, with four strong young men hired from the groups that hung out in the market place, waiting for casual work.
The last delivery was to Dav's bar, where Wixa paid off the four men and bought them all a round of drinks. She looked as if she'd like to join them, and looking around at the mixed clientele of humans and aliens, so close to the docks, Maiga understood. This place had to be gossip central. But it was also noise central and not Maiga's scene at all. Chullan's coffee house suited her better. Seeing Maiga's reluctance Wixa said goodnight to their temporary workers and they left the bar.
"Come on, we'll have a cup of coffee somewhere quiet."
Somewhere quiet turned out to be Wixa's own quarters. They were twice the size of Maiga's own, and more obviously a permanent home, full of decoration and ornaments, with colourful throws on the furniture, rugs on the floor, and pictures on the wall. The living room was comfortable and, to Maiga's mind, a mess that could do with being tidied up with a flamethrower.