by Diane Carey
He grinned at the bridge crew and pulled out a cigarette.
“I can see why everybody hates you so much,” Clyde commented. “You’re such a hard-ass.”
“A hard-ass, sir,” Alley required, lighting up.
“Oh—sir. Pardon.”
“Let’s do some visual scans and see if there’s damage that requires immediate attention, or what can be done robotically or what needs hands-on, and all that. Let’s keep the EV activities to a minimum until we’re on our way. Don’t want to take a chance of squishing anybody while we’re rafted up.”
Jonsy evaluated whether or not to speak. “Are… you gonna lodge a shipmaster malconduct complaint?”
“I should. But, hey, everybody’s entitled to a screw-up now and then. Burton’s probably kicking himself a lot harder than I want to kick him. He can’t afford to lose his license. Still got children living at home. He’s got a forty-three-year-old daughter who’s still ‘finding herself.’”
“You’re too forgiving.”
“Gotta be forgiving in space. It’s cold and lonely. Forgiveness is the only warmth.”
“Plus you get to avoid the hassle,” Clyde commented.
“What? Avoid two weeks of bureaucratic protocol and forms and depositions and hair-pulling? Yeah, someday I’ll be the slob who needs to be cut some slack.”
Nick Alley scanned the bank of screens that displayed the ship’s exterior from many angles—forward and abaft of the beams, on both the quarters, the bows, the flank bays, the tumblehome, the hull, and the cap-structure. When she moved through space, the Virginia created a velvet-black spot in space, delineated only by the beautiful emblems, logos, call letters, and her gigantic name in hyper-bright gold paint, and, most impressive, a bigger-than-life mural of the strange United States ironclad Monitor once again plying the waters of Norfolk Harbor, blocking the bigger Confederate ironclad Merrimack from achieving her goal of dominating those waters. In one of history’s greatest coincidental equinoxes, the rafty Monitor, with its hatbox turret, and the Merrimack, a metal roof with a hull underneath, moved in space seemingly without artificial support. Nobody spent money on painting the naturally black hulls of modern cargo haulers, but everybody spent it on proudly displaying identities and loyalties with complex dazzlepainting, scrollwork, mosaics, murals, and chromataphoric enameled renderings that changed in the constant self-illuminants embedded into the outer structure like theatrical fresnels. In the tradition of the European exploration ships the 1600s, a ship’s brightly patterned hull was a badge of the financial success of their owners and captains. Giant dazzlepainted movers plowed the charted spacelanes in an eruption of commerce. Artists made big fortunes with clever illumination using lights and paint. The perfect amalgamation of frugality and décor was always in demand. How cleverly could a giant black billboard be decorated so that the display was provocative while profits could still be made?
Besides, Captain Alley thought, it made a good story for the kid passengers. And then came the punch line… the ironclad Merrimack had been made from the plated-over hull of a ship called the CSS Virginia. Oooooh. Aaaaah.
On Virginia’s massive black side, the signature encounter of her namesake’s history sailed now through open space, forever engaged. No longer locked in 1862, the Battle of Hampton Roads had moved to outer space and would live in elegant immortality.
Flushed with the relief of having corrected the dangerous approach, the captain smiled. The art of bringing two ships together was as dicey in space as it had ever been on water, just a fact of life. For millennia, ships had been the workhorses in the most hostile environs mankind had traversed. Into the tropics, the arctic, the Horse Latitudes, the Great Lakes, Hudson Bay, enduring storms and doldrums, the typhoons and ice and biting flies, ships had been the mothers of progress. When mankind moved into space, he moved in ships. Finally, after decades of ferrying only the hardiest sacrificial pioneers and soldiers into space, Earth had taken the next step. Space was now a pathway for more than just mining, salvage, military, and bare-bones settlements clinging by fingernails to the scruffy cusp of new ground. Ships were safer now, spacelanes charted, guides experienced, and regulations relaxed. Now, an embryonic market appeared for tourism, entertainment, capitalism, and even plain old education for its own sake. Today there were chances to go to space just to look around. A whole new breed of ships was being constructed for these purposes, the newest of which was the Virginia. She was a tour and museum vessel, taking people out into space while conducting seminars and presentations of the history and future of human expansion.
Those were the passenger decks, anyway. In the multiple holds, the Virginia, like all other ships in space, shuttled cargo. Every last inch of room aboard was packed with necessities for outlying settlements and the bright new cities springing up where once there had been only outposts.
And then there were the people who were still pioneering spirits. They rode the ship on one-way tickets to new lives. This ship might be the last civilized habitat they would experience for a long time.
Captain Alley believed in all those missions, and he nodded in agreement with his thoughts.
He really believed.
* * *
“If this gets out, we’re dead.”
On a ship in space, night and day were said to blur into one continuous night, but that wasn’t true. Jonsy Coyne had always felt the difference. Now, preparing for a loading maneuver, it was all-hands-on-deck, but Jonsy felt the tug of lightheadedness, as if it were the depth of the night. Ordinarily he would have been asleep right about now. But he couldn’t think about that. He only had minutes to commit subterfuge.
Sweat sheeted his face and chest, leeching through his crew shirt, a new layer of sweat, worse than the sweat from the rafting maneuver just forty minutes ago. This was a full-body paste, as if he’d lathered himself with oil. He could barely keep a grip on the bosun’s box, a hand-held computer unit specially made to store and manage the ship’s complex cargo manifests, locking codes, transfer orders, loading plan, and myriad other necessities of a job with endless details. Jonsy buttoned through scan after scan, manipulating the codes to accept the complex deceptions he had forced the machine to digest. To do what needed to be done today, he had severed the link between his personal box and the ship’s mainframe. He still didn’t believe it had worked, or that it would keep working. The ship’s computer was probably looking for the bosun’s box link right now, sending out signal after signal, trying to get a response, calling and calling like a desperate mother bird. Any minute now it would set off alarms, send out warnings, make announcements in that wily lady’s voice, and the cover would be blown right off the pot.
He and Rockie huddled in a blade of shadow in the ship’s cavernous and dim starboard hold. Lights were at a minimum, to save energy, creating a cave-like environment of narrow, dark passages and high, sheer walls. Shadows made sharp black knife-shapes that speared the cavern. They hid next to one of the three test-loaded containers he had just boarded from the Mequon, close enough that Jonsy’s bosun’s box could connect directly with the locking panel on this specific container. The test-load, part of the procedure for every transfer, had gone flawlessly, in record time—only nine minutes—and that somehow made him nervous. At his order, the two ships had seamlessly shifted six containers, three each, to make sure the cranes, airlocks, winches, grav-shifters, and other mechanisms in the jungle-like loading canopy were working properly. Regulations were satisfied. In a few minutes, the remaining five thousand house-sized containers aboard Virginia would be switched with over eight thousand containers waiting aboard the Mequon. The ships were linked up, entertaining the final transfusions before intership autoload. Once it started, there would be no stopping it without giving away their plan. Rockie’s plan.
Frantically manipulating the bosun’s box, Jonsy looked up, up, up at the huge Brittany-blue container. The other two test containers, he didn’t care about. This one… this was the one. This battere
d old container with scratches that showed its many layers of paint, with dents that decried its dependability. It had seen many transfers, but none like this. He’d jiggered every protocol to make sure this old blue jug was one of the first three. Its coded locking system, only inches from his face, placidly displayed its authorizations, all faked. He kept thumbing the controls as if he were playing a computer game, countermanding every successive protest from the system. He chased each code protest as it popped up, leading to the next one. The box didn’t like what he was doing, and he coddled it one protest at a time. He prayed it would soon run out of failsafes and relax, and allow this container to remain aboard.
“Rockie, are we completely, I mean completely sure about this?”
“Honey, we’re sure!”
He leered at the container as if seeing through its walls to the cryogenic tubes inside, to the contents held there in stasis. Fourteen very important, very rare, and monumentally dangerous tubes. The bosun’s box kept flashing red anger at him, and he kept tapping away the flush. Red, green, red, green, red, yellow, green… red…
“Illegal to own, illegal to transport, illegal to experiment on—what if these things are infected or viral? What if they’re toxic? I don’t want to fiddle with a bomb like that.”
“It’s nothing like that,” she insisted.
“It’s something like that! Why else would anybody pay us so much?”
“So much, honey.” Rockie put her teeth together and parted her lips, sucking in the fragrance of ambition. She clasped his lanky torso in a full-body hug, hunching to make him feel taller. “Enough to start a whole new life. Enough to buy our own transport ship! You’ll be a captain, like you deserve. This is a dream come true, our dream, coming true! This isn’t the time to lose your nerve. The job is done. All we have to do is ride it out.”
She spoke with dangerous intensity, as if their secret were the secret of the century, the one great secret a couple could share, the secret that would only bear the weight of two people. To tell anyone else would snap it like sugar threads.
Squirming in her embrace, Jonsy nearly choked on his own bile. “Maybe we should drop it right now, fess up, y’know, give in… Do we know what, y’know, what we’re doing? The laws are ironclad on this. No transportation of these—these animals—these creatures, whatever they are, in any stage…
“You can’t even transport any dangerous substance without a whole bible of paperwork, never mind these monsters. No weaponized cells or bacteria, no cloneable tissue—What we’re doing carries a mandatory death sentence, Rockie—death. Y’know, death? I looked up the history of these things… it’s not pretty, I’m telling you.”
He stole a quick glance up at the massive blue container with the yellow chevrons. All around them, here in the starboard hold, thousands of containers waited to be moved. Each container was stamped with giant bright markings that identified it, like the rectangular bodies of dressed knights’ horsesin repose on a tournament ground, each declaring the colors of its house.
And in the cavern of transport containers, this one box, this blue one with the yellow chevrons… this battered old gravity-puffer seemed to know it was completely alone today.
Rockie pursed her lips and tipped her chin up to bring her mouth close to his. “They’re dead, baby, they already had their death sentence. They died in the—what’d they call that stage? You know the right words.”
“It’s the… the proto-xenomorphic stage, between the infant stage and the adult stage.”
“See how in control you are?” She flickered her eyes at him and smiled in admiration. “You know they’re just dead tissue, just frozen cells for somebody to play with or mount or—who cares? Remember what you told me? There’s that clause permitting transportation of non-living scientific research specimens.”
“Not this kind. There’s no loophole these things can squeeze through.”
“They’re frozen, baby. Dead, dead, dead, tissue, tissue, tissue. Like clipped fingernails. Like hair on the barber’s floor. They can’t hurt anybody. Unless maybe you eat ’em.” Her shoulders rolled back and forth in a series of shrugs as she cast off his worries.
“I guess…” His gaunt face hurt. Tense muscles twitched, his lips, cheeks, eyes. Code after code flashed between his fingers, faster and faster as the system fought the new protocol pattern he was forcing down its throat. “What would anybody want these things for?”
“What do we care?” Rockie dismissed, waving her long fingers. “Medical experimentation, science research… maybe a museum wants to put them on display. Remember once you moved that frozen mammoth so it could be thawed and stuffed?”
He nodded, managing a smile. “Taxidermists must be a little sick in the head, y’know?”
The bosun’s box flickered with warnings. It was being scanned by the mainframe. Where are you? Why aren’t you answering? Do I have to shut you down?
Banishing thoughts of being fired, or arrested, charged, imprisoned, maybe even executed, he let Rockie lead the way by feeding his ambitions. While he poked the box’s feeder panel, calming it down, his wife caressed the corner of the big illegal container.
“I found this deal,” Rockie said. “You know my sources are good. It’s a shortcut to success. Just this once, baby.”
“You’re too much with shortcuts,” Jonsy murmured. “You need to get that prison colony out of your head.”
“It made me tough.” Her eyes turned to hard obsidian disks. “Tough, so I would be ready for today. My whole childhood in that pot of criminals, it carved me for today. Guards for foster parents. They taught me the only things they knew—angles. Guards know all the angles. This is fate playing out.”
In the murmur of impending activity, the Virginia hummed with hot systems. Everybody, every circuit was happy to be alive and blessed with duties. Roxanne’s eyes narrowed to the Polynesian wedges that Jonsy had first found so irresistible. He imagined her on some tropical island, raising her hands to the gods of fire, with flowers around her wrists and vines around her head like a crown.
“That place,” she uttered. “Nobody there was worthy of respect. Everything was a scam or a deal or a dodge. You don’t get respect and you don’t give any.” She turned to him and surveyed him from head to foot in a way that made him feel bigger than he was. “Now I’m married. A respectable woman with a husband who works a respectable job.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t shake the tree,” he attempted again.
“Why settle for peanuts? You should be more! Have more! You shouldn’t be taking orders from somebody else. You have all it takes to be a captain.”
“I don’t have a commercial captain’s license—”
“But if you own your own ship, you don’t need one. That’s ancient maritime law. You taught me that. You have all the contacts to get your own cargos. Why should you wait around on some long list, hoping for some bureaucrat to give you permission to make your own fortune? Forget it! Success is in your hand, right there!” She tapped the bosun’s box. “It’s just this once. You’ve never cheated a freight manifest before. You’re entitled one little cheat. One little step to get you all the way up the ladder.”
“Just let me finish before they find me…”
The container’s locking panel began to flash numbers at him in coded sequence, matching the new codes he had forced into the bosun’s box against all its failsafes. He had to let them come up, kill them, replace them, then do it again with slightly altered codes. The box was now communicating with the container, giving new loading and locking codes that would disguise the fact that it was completely contraband. If his thumb slipped, if one numeral was wrong, the container’s own security system would start blaring. The Virginia would hear it, and all the alarms would wake the dead.
The shadows slicing down around him seemed blacker by the moment. Eyes of night predators leered at him from the depths—or were those just the pairs of red safety lights? In his left ear, Rockie’s voice murmured on, as smoot
h as a buzz from fine wine.
“And we can strike gold today, baby, you and me… Tomorrow you won’t be just a bosun on somebody else’s ship. Tomorrow you’ll be on the market for your own ship! You know everybody in every spaceport. Shouldn’t all this be yours? Just because you didn’t come up through the military, you don’t have some big backer, just because other people got lucky, shouldn’t you be lucky just once? You need connections to move up. Today, we’ve got the connections. If we just do this one time. Just once!”
Eyes… those were only lights, just faint red lights to help him in his escape.
Jonsy nodded, pumped up by her enthusiasm, like the last time and the time before as she kept his ego from slipping into despair. He knew he was good enough. All he needed was the down payment on a ship.
He’d never cheated before. Never once betrayed a captain or an owner or an employer. He knew Rockie would go further than he would himself, push acquaintances and use connections if she could find them, and somehow she had found them. What kind of people was she dealing with? After all this, would they come through? Or would he and his wife be hung out to dry?
“I didn’t go through all the training for being a captain,” he sputtered. “I don’t have a master’s ticket—”
“I can get you whatever you need to show anybody.” Rockie saw the doubt in his face. She could always see through him. So she kept talking. Talking, so that his thoughts would be crowded out. “It doesn’t matter how deep into debt we go. You’ll be able to get cargo. No approval from anybody else. No standing around with your hat in your hand. Own the ship… own the ship… Keep that in front of your mind. Own the ship… own the ship.”