“That would be our business and none of yours,” Allie said. She cocked her head. “You know, if you’re going to do a certain sort of business out here on the Fringe, and I assume you are, what with this ship and your rather odd stint in the Navy, you really ought to engage in a bit of professional courtesy with your peers.”
“Is it your professional courtesy to loot a man’s purse?” Dansby asked.
“‘Loot’?” Allie asked. “And here I’d thought I’d given fair value.”
A faint “ooohhh” drifted into the silent cabin from behind the closed hatch.
“A ten-pound socket-fee for what I’d not give tuppence —”
Dansby cut himself off as Kaycie’s glare, Rabbit’s bemused look, the hardening of Blackbourne’s face, and a louder “ooohhh” met his words.
“Detheridge!” he yelled. “Have the hands nothing better to do than hang about outside my door?”
Detheridge shrugged. “Not as such, no —”
“Such as searching that bloody ship for ten pounds of value?”
“We’ve a crew on that, sir.”
“Then set the rest of them to it, as well. And take these two away, will you? Keep them somewhere safe until the search is done.”
“Aye, sir.”
Twenty-Five
“So,” Kaycie asked when the Blackbournes were gone, “is Elizabeth some sort of prison hulk now?”
She stood and went to Dansby’s pantry to retrieve a better bottle of wine, opened it and poured. All the while Dansby remained silent, watching her, and quite certain she had more words for him than that. Kaycie looked at the bottle in her hand, frowned, and set it down on the table.
“I mean,” Kaycie went on as she wandered farther into his cabin, idly sipping wine, “we have your errant master’s mate first, and now these two. How long do you plan to hold them prisoner?”
“Until I find my —”
“Ten bloody pounds, yes.” Kaycie went to the bunk, picked up a pillow, then tossed it back. “And you won’t just write those off as a fee? For …” Kaycie snorted. “… services?”
“It wasn’t —” Dansby searched for some explanation to address the thing directly. “It’s not as though I cared for her — it was just —”
“Don’t say it,” Kaycie said, holding up her hand to stop him. She sighed. “You know, there is no greater proof against genetic memory than that men still think that will make a difference. One would think, after a few millennia, advice against it might even become part of the talk fathers give.”
Kaycie moved to his cabinet and began going through drawers. Dansby couldn’t figure what she was looking for, as she knew were everything was. Her own things, mostly, were in the first mate’s cabin, despite his repeated suggestions that she simply join him here permanently.
“Look, Kaycie, it’s not as though we ever … well, it’s not as though we’ve ever gone and said —” Dansby broke off, uncertain if this tack were any better than the last, but the fact was, he’d tried to speak with Kaycie about the state of the two of them and any future they had, but she wouldn’t.
“No, I suppose we haven’t,” Kaycie said. She opened the bottom drawer and began going through his old boots, picking one up and weighing it in her hand.
Well, perhaps this tack did have some legs to it, Kaycie seeming to agree with him. “So it’s not as though we had an understanding.”
Kaycie replaced the boot, closed the drawer and frowned. “No, I’m quite certain we didn’t understand each other.”
That didn’t sound quite as agreeable. More like the flash of ebony across a distant roil of darkspace’s clouds — the harbinger of a building storm. “I was some time aboard Tyche, you know,” Dansby hazarded, “and a man does have certain —”
Kaycie ceased her wanderings at the locked chest containing Elizabeth’s ready coin and tapped the lock to open it. In addition to the ship’s funds it now contained the few bars of gallenium recovered from his and Tart’s vacsuits after their stint adrift. She reached in and hefted one, nodding.
“Needs, is it? Millenia of selection,” Kaycie murmured so that he barely heard her, “and still the gene for that excuse hasn’t been lost.”
She hurled the heavy bar of gallenium at Dansby’s head.
The subsequent row, Dansby thought, was quite on par with anything put on by Sween and Presgraves.
The gallenium bar whizzed through the space his head had occupied and would have taken him right between the eyes if he hadn’t ducked out of the way with a startled, “Shite!” and he’d barely turned to see it strike the bulkhead with a weighty thunk before the next bar took him in the shoulder.
After that, it was all a matter of dodging until he got around the table and near his bunk where he was able to grasp a pillow to deflect or absorb the next bars.
The shouting, he thought, had certain advantages over the other pair’s dialog, as Sween and Preserves normally limited themselves to insults, while he and Kaycie had an actual thing to work out, with her starting at him being an unfaithful boggart — some reference to his taking on a different name, he supposed — and him demanding how in the Dark he could betray a troth they’d never actually pledged.
In between the name calling, he did manage to work out that Kaycie, despite not wanting to formalize their doings while he was still intent on being Avrel Dansby and unwilling to return to the more normal life of Jon Bartlett, still expected him to behave as though they’d had such formalization — a distinction that escaped Dansby all-entire, but which, he allowed, he could make use of as a working model, now he came to understand it.
For her part, Kaycie supposed that there might have been some ambiguity in her position, as perceived by someone of less than penetrating insight and an utter inability to grasp subtle nuances. As such, she might be willing to forgo gutting either Dansby or Allie Blackbourne, provided Dansby understood he’d receive no such leniency in future.
Dansby, wisely, he thought, ignored the inherent attack on his own intellect in Kaycie’s position, and agreed that it had all been a horrid misunderstanding entirely the fault of his limited understanding and that such a thing would never again happen now he understood how things stood between them.
Or didn’t stand between them, as, of course, they had no formal understanding merely the …
Bugger it, Dansby thought, and simply repeated, “Yes, of course,” until Kaycie ran down a bit.
All of that settled, the subsequent making up did make him wonder if Sween and Presgraves, despite the amusement of the crew, might have the right of it. There was something to be said for getting the blood up a bit before — his thoughts were cut off by Kaycie’s sigh, and he adjusted himself in the bunk slightly, thinking she was uncomfortable. Adjusted on the bunk’s base, rather, as the mattress itself had somehow come loose from its tie downs and shifted half off, leaving them lying on the hard base between mattress edge and bulkhead. Leaving him lying there, rather, as Kaycie had avoided that by the simple expediency of lying atop Dansby.
“Are you cold?” he asked. There were sheets and blankets somewhere, he thought — if they could manage to untangle the things from about his legs or … he glanced about … retrieve one from the dining table, though how it got there he couldn’t remember.
“No, not cold.” She shivered, giving lie to the words. Or perhaps not, as she asked then, “What are you going to do with them? Tart and the other two?”
“For the Blackbournes, get my ten pounds, then let them go, I suppose. Of Tart, I’m unsure — perhaps I could turn him over to Eades and let the Foreign Office convince him of some story. Assuming he recovers, of course.”
“Why not just toss the three of them out the airlock and keep the pinnace?”
“What?” Dansby was shocked. “That’s —”
“Piracy, yes.” Kaycie shifted against him. “We’re already guilty of that, having fired on their ship and boarded it, you know — so why not go the rest of the way?”
“That’s not —”
“What? You have some qualms?”
“I’m not going to kill the little bint over ten pounds!”
“How much would you kill the little bint over, then?” Kaycie asked. “What I’m getting at, Mister Dansby, is to find out how much of my Jon is left behind this facade, you see?”
“Kaycie —”
“No, don’t.” She held him tight. “I stayed with you after you took this ship, Jon, because you had nowhere else to go — even taking the ship was right, after we found the Marchants were involved in slaving. I stayed with you as you went into that smuggling nonsense instead of honest trade —”
“There’s not enough —”
“You’ve a whole bloody ship, Jon.” She waved one hand to take in Elizabeth. “For the sake of the Dark, she’s your family’s own design, fast as anything that sails — she’d outreach her own bloody lights if you gave her her head and asked it of her. You’re a Bartlett, Jon, you grew up at your father’s knee and, whatever else it may have been, Lesser Sewer was a fine school to learn the trade. Are you telling me, with this ship and this crew and all you know, that Jon Bartlett can’t make an honest profit?”
“Not enough of one,” Dansby said. She might be angry with him … again. Might have a right to be … again. But on this he was certain. “You’ve seen the numbers. The costs.”
Kaycie sighed. “I fear you’re not going to find her, Jon. No matter how much you pay the searchers — the distance, the records, the —”
Dansby knew she was right, even as he knew it didn’t matter. His mother’d been transported aboard an indenture ship, sent out into the Fringe worlds until someone, somewhere, bought up her debt. The where of that wouldn’t arrive back until the ship itself came back to some Core world with its records, if that ever happened, and so he had searchers out. Expensive ones, trying to follow the ship on all the different paths it might take from world to world, no matter the cost. “I have to try.”
“It would be easier, for us all, I think, if you could let it go.”
Dansby didn’t begrudge her that thought — not entirely, at least.
There were spacers aboard Elizabeth who’d never see their families again, either, what with being far from home and no particular prospects of returning. Family members died while they were a’space, or were transported as his mother had been — for crimes or debt or simply seeking a better life on some new world. He supposed they must set it all aside and let it go, so why shouldn’t he?
Kaycie’s own parents were alive and well, though, having sold out their shipping company to the Marchants, while Dansby’s, Jon Bartlett’s, had refused and been utterly destroyed for it. He couldn’t forgive that — the Marchant company, and Frederick Marchant at its head, had destroyed his life and everything, he held Kaycie closer, almost everything he loved. Fresh anger built in him at the memory and the futility he felt when he thought of the Marchants. What could he do to repay them?
Kaycie must have felt him tense, because she wrapped her arms all the tighter around him.
“I know your vow, Jon,” she whispered, echoing his own thoughts, “but even if you get more funds, even if you find your mother, what hope have you of fighting them?”
He’d thought, when he took Elizabeth in the Barbary, that he might use her against the Marchants somehow, but what could he really do with just one ship?
“I worry for you, Jon,” Kaycie said, “that you dwell on this so.”
“They killed him,” Dansby murmured, pressing his face against Kaycie’s hair and fighting against the comfort of her arms. He meant his father, and she knew that. He’d killed himself, but it was the Marchants who’d driven him to it.
“I know.”
“And mother’s — I don’t know what’s become of her — and she’s out there somewhere in the Fringe, not knowing what’s become of me.”
“I know, Jon,” Kaycie said, “but even if she’s never to know what’s become of you, don’t become what she’d never want to know.”
Twenty-Six
“This is it?” Dansby asked.
He reached out and poked at the few coins on his table top — literally the six pence Blackbourne had said was aboard the pinnace.
Detheridge nodded. “Searched high and low, sir — there’re hidey-holes, but all empty. No cargo to speak of — stores and ship supplies. No coin, but that.” She shrugged. “Could take what you want out of stores — ten pounds ain’t but —”
“I’ll not take my recompense in vat solution and thermoplastic coils,” Dansby stopped her. “There’s a principle involved.”
“Not much coin in principles,” Detheridge muttered.
“Don’t I know it,” Dansby said.
He stood and gathered up the coins. “I can’t believe they have nothing of value aboard. They’d not have so glibly left Mabmond if their cargo wasn’t aboard yet, so it has to be there.”
“We looked,” Detheridge said.
“I’ve no doubt, but Rabbit’s a cunning one.”
“Rabbit?”
“Never mind.”
Dansby pocketed the six pence and left his cabin to make his way to where the pinnace was still docked. They’d done away with the flexible docking tube and brought the smaller ship right up against Elizabeth — the pinnace was just the size of the largest boat Elizabeth could take, so they’d been able to move on, leaving Mabmond, Upper and Lower both, far behind.
That neither Blackbourne had squawked at that made Dansby more certain that their cargo was aboard and not back on the planet waiting to be loaded. The pair would not be so easy about leaving it behind, if it were.
The pinnace was a tidy ship, if quite small.
Fusion plant aft, a cockpit forward, rather than a proper ship’s quarterdeck, as the small ship was able to make a surface landing itself instead of carrying boats that would be as large as it was itself.
There was a hold below, empty, if Dansby’s searchers were to be believed, of all but nutrient solution for the single beef vat and other normal stores. He could take his ten pounds value from those easily enough, but then Rabbit and her damned, bearded brother would sail off, laughing at him for not having found their cargo.
He’d had enough of Rabbit’s laughing at him and wanted to give a bit back, though he should probably be careful about saying so. He didn’t like the consequences if Kaycie began to feel he was thinking too much on the other girl, even if it was for a profit — or recompense, if not profit.
Dansby wandered the pinnace, taking in his crew’s searches.
There were panels taken off here and there to expose empty compartments. Some of those were obvious and some were not, which meant his assumption the twins were smuggling was sound.
He tapped bulkheads, looking for still-hidden compartments, even going so far to tap at the bulkheads within hidden compartments, looking for the double-blind, but found nothing.
The main deck was in a similar state to the hold and less able to hide anything, being a mostly open space between fusion plant and cockpit, with a small galley to one side, a head to the other, and a pair of cots with no cabins or other rooms. There was space along the bulkheads where other cots had been removed, the pinnace being manageable by two, but with room, crowded they may be, for up to twelve.
Dansby picked through the main deck, opening cabinets and chests his crew had already searched. The Blackbournes’ things weren’t strewn about, his crew was better than that, but there was a certain way things were stacked or piled or arranged that spoke to having been disturbed.
In all, he thought it was a sad little ship, two grifters sailing the Dark between worlds, running from whatever trouble they’d started on their last planetfall to what they planned for the next.
He looked back to the hatch and Elizabeth beyond.
Yes, far better to have a real ship and full crew if one was to be about that sort of thing.
He found nothing in the main cabin, so made his way to th
e cockpit.
The space had seating for four, and consoles for that number, but only three were working — the fourth had a bit of clutter atop it, as though it was used as a simple table by the ship’s occupants.
His crew had searched even here. Dansby could see where they’d moved clutter aside to access the panels beneath the dead console and looked inside to ensure there was no cargo hidden there.
He crouched down and sighed — best to be thorough, though it seemed the Blackbournes had been telling the truth. Perhaps they hadn’t yet loaded their cargo back on Upper Mabmond, despite their lack of protestations at leaving it behind if they had. They might trust their contact there enough to know it would be waiting for them, no matter how long it took them to return.
Would it be better, then, to sail back to Mabmond and collect his ten pounds out of the pair’s cargo, or sail on, pinnace in tow, and drop the troublemakers far away so that they’d have to make their own way back.
He unscrewed the bolts holding the console’s side panel in place and set the plate aside.
In the latter case, of course, he’d be out his ten pounds, but leaving Rabbit and her brother with the decision to spend so much time beating their way back to Mabmond or if leaving that cargo behind might be worth it.
Nothing in the console he didn’t expect, simply the circuit boards, dead as the console itself, and empty space. He reached inside to feel around where he couldn’t see properly and suddenly jerked his arm away from one of the circuits.
The thing was hot — well, not hot, but warm — and why would that be when the console itself was dark and lifeless?
Dansby frowned.
Was the console still powered, even though the display was dead?
He cleared some space on the top and tapped at the glass, but nothing changed.
Why leave power to a dead console?
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