by Elle Casey
Lucinda’s gaze darts in Jeffers' direction and then back toward me. I see conflict in her eyes, a battle between fear and hope reflected with no clear winner. I suddenly know what I have to do.
“I’m not going to hurt your plants. I just want to see what you’re growing. I smell … flowers.”
“She already knows about the tea,” Jeffers says.
Lucinda’s entire body sags at that news, her shoulders rounding down and her expression falling into sadness. “Why?” Her tone has gone weak. Defeated. “Why didn’t you talk to me first? Wait and see what she was about first? She could be anybody. She could be with the OSG.”
“Not in a million years,” I say with disgust.
“Sometimes we just have to have faith that the universe is providing and not taking away.” Jeffers gestures with one arm out, the extra width of his sleeves falling toward the floor. “Please, Captain. After you.”
As I step into the entrance, Lucinda looks to Jeffers with anger shining out from behind her eyes. “You’d better be right, Healer, or we’re all screwed.”
Chapter Six
THE SCENTS INTENSIFY AS I move farther into the chamber, but without light to see by, I have no idea what’s creating this unique atmosphere.
No sooner is the thought floating through my mind than a blue-green glow begins to flicker above me. I lift my eyes to the top of the ship’s hull, or what I expect to be the top of it, and instead I find myself looking at pipes. And towers. Towers with things protruding from every part of their rounded sides.
“What in the bottom of a black hole…?”
“Biotowers,” Jeffers says, appearing at my right shoulder. “Floor to ceiling. All hydroponic.”
“But I smelled…”
“Soil?” He smiles. “We do have some things growing in that medium. Some plants that are a little too big to do well without.”
Lucinda’s voice comes from behind us. “Why don’t you go ahead and give her the full tour? Might as well.”
Do I detect a hint of pride in her voice? Hmmm, I do believe I do.
“No,” I say firmly, my eyes still roaming the ceiling and the intricate maze of pipes. “I want you to show me.”
“I’m not your servant. Just because I work on this ship doesn’t mean I answer to you.”
I turn around and smile at her, half laughing at her show of bravado. “Sure it does. Come on. Show me what you’ve done. I’m interested.”
She sniffs, not moving, looking away from me to stare at the wall next to her.
“Fine. I’ll show myself around.” I stride off down the corridor formed by several growing towers lined up side by side. When I see something that looks a little darker than the other things near it, I take a right turn, losing myself in the leaves around me.
“Don’t go down there!” she shouts from behind me.
Good, I’m on the right track. I keep going until I get to a strong scent of mint and turn left. A different glow and the sounds of spraying liquid drive me right and then left again. Eventually I find myself staring at a high stack of rafts floating in square bins of water as long and wide as me. Maybe bigger.
I pull off a leaf, rub it between my fingers and bring it to my nose. “Coriander,” I say softly to myself. I lick away the smears from my finger and thumb, bringing a taste I haven’t had on my tongue in at least five years. I can’t help but smile as I realize how much of the stuff is growing here. And if I’m not mistaken, there are at least four other herbs I learned about in my father’s kitchens many years ago, floating on other rafts down the line.
Holy shit. They have a gold mine in here, and Langlade didn’t even have a clue.
I start laughing and can’t stop. First Jeffers and then Lucinda show up, both of them just staring at me. At least Jeffers smiles in response. Lucinda, on the other hand, just gets more annoyed.
“I don’t see what’s so funny.”
I finally calm down enough to sigh and respond. “What’s so funny is you pumping the smells of that shit into the antechamber so none of those droid-heads would want to investigate any farther into your world. Genius.” I stand up straighter, losing my smile. “And devious. What have you been doing with the harvest?” I jerk my thumb over at the herbs. “You have herbs, you have tea… I suspect you have just about every vegetable a human would want to eat and maybe even some fruit. How many credits have you stolen from Langlade over the years?”
“We aren’t thieves!” Lucinda says, taking a step toward me.
Jeffers' arm going across her middle stops her in her tracks. Lucky for her, he decided to play savior again, because I’m about out of patience with her and her shitty attitude. She needs to step in line or she’s off this ship tonight. I don’t have time for mutiny, and jobless biogridders are easy enough to find.
“Allow me to explain,” he says. “Would you like to see the rest of it as I do that?”
I nod, refusing to play too nice. He might be like my old grandpa, but that’s not going to influence how I view their actions. I will, however, withhold judgment until I hear the entire story. I’ve been known to skirt the edge between right and wrong in the name of survival more than a few times; I can hardly punish others for doing the same. So long as they have a decent reason for doing what they’ve done, I can be fair.
Jeffers walks and I motion for Lucinda to follow him. I’m not having that wench at my back anytime soon.
She follows my orders for the first time since I met her, but not happily. She scowls as she takes up her position just in front of me.
“We’ve been working on the infrastructure for this grow chamber for nearly a year, about a month after Lucinda arrived to become a part of the crew.”
“Eleven months and three days ago,” she says in an unhappy monotone.
“It wasn’t easy,” Jeffers continues. “All the parts had to be bartered for. We couldn’t put any of the requisition requests on the regular manifest for obvious reasons.”
“Not so obvious to me,” I say. “Explain.”
He sighs. “Langlade did not support the idea of bartering medicinal products and food for what he needed. He preferred a more … swashbuckling approach, shall we say?”
I nod, even though neither of them can see me do it. This story absolutely jives with the Langlade I know and have heard about. He would have considered it the work of an OSG’s academic, not a real man. Not an independent businessman for certain.
“So our plan was to build the system, get it up and running, make a few trades to prove our concept, and then show him the hard numbers.”
I realize we’ve left solid ground and are now walking on grates. I look past my feet and see hints of other pipes running below us.
“How big is this grid?” I ask.
“One hundred and eighty square meters, stacked,” Lucinda says, again with pride tainting her words.
“How high? How many towers?”
“It’s hard to give exact numbers, because we’re still figuring things out, seeing what grows well and what doesn’t, but our estimates say we can produce at Level G.”
I stop in my tracks, my legs no longer interested in working. “Level G? That can’t be right.” Level K can sustain a community of two hundred souls. There’s no way they have that much capacity here on this ship. They’d need something three times this size.
Lucinda turns around, her tone bitchy. “Of course it can. Do you doubt my calculations?”
Looking around, I take in the towers going to the top of the hull and their bases starting below my feet. Some quick math based on the footprint they gave me and the number of plants I see sticking out of the holes in the cylinders tells me her calculations are probably about right.
My blood starts pounding really loudly in my ears. They’re growing up here, not simply on flats like every other ship-based system I’ve seen. And it’s all hydroponic, using every centimeter of available space. It’s been done before, of course, but not on a ship. Not on a ship of this siz
e, anyway. Normally that kind of production is reserved for actual bioships, the BioS fleets that hover nearby the main settlements in the center of the galaxy.
“Holy shit,” I say, my voice full of awe. “We’re not sitting on a gold mine. We’re sitting on a trillium mine.”
Lucinda shrugs and then smiles for the first time since I met her. “You may not be much in the captain department, but at least you’re good with numbers.”
Chapter Seven
LEAVING THE BIOGRID BEHIND IS hard, but I have business to attend to, and the rest of the universe is not going to wait on my desire to inhale the intoxicating scents of growing things. Jeffers follows as I make my way up to the flightdeck.
“So, what do you think?” he asks, out of breath from trying to keep up. Memorizing the layout of all the different drifter ships has made finding my way back to where I want to be a lot easier than I thought it would.
“I’m impressed,” I say, my tone noncommittal.
“Do you know what you want to do with it?”
“With what?” I pass my hand over the keypad screen that allows admittance to the flightdeck. I frown when nothing happens.
Jeffers reaches around me, his minted breath brushing across my cheek as he punches in a code manually. I commit it to memory as the door slides open.
“With the production,” he prompts. “Will you sell it? Keep it for the crew?”
“I’ll let you know later. I have other things I need to take care of first.” I walk up the four steps separating the main floor from the control area and sit down in the captain’s chair so I can look out the clearpanels and have access to the ship’s control array. A small crowd has gathered at the dock and several of its members are looking at my ship.
Jeffers stops next to me, following my gaze. “Looks like someone’s not happy.”
Langlade is out there, gesticulating like a mad fool in front of a man wearing an OSG uniform.
“Uh-oh.” I’d hoped to be gone before he sobered up and realized what he’d done. “Trouble in Triangulum.”
“You won the ship. There’s nothing he can do about that now.”
I look at Jeffers and half smile. “I thought you said I practically stole it.”
He shrugs, looking out the window. “Gambling is bad business, that’s all I meant.”
“I didn’t cheat. I won fair and square.”
“I don’t doubt you did.” He looks at me and stares hard into my eyes, making me want to squirm. “You don’t strike me as a cheater at anything.”
Before I can comment, a crackling comes from a loudspeaker hidden somewhere on the flightdeck and then a voice rings out. One of the blackpanels near the clearpanel flickers, and the face of one of the gingers appears in it. “Hey, Captain, you up there? You around?” He looks over his shoulder and then back at the camera.
I look at the vast array of buttons on the arm of my chair, clueless about how to operate it. This doesn’t look like anything I ever saw on the sim or in my training manuals.
Jeffers reaches over without a word and presses a green button with the word ‘TALK’ on it.
I shake my head in frustration as I speak. “I’m here. What’s going on?”
“Got a little trouble down here on the dock. Feel like coming out and saying hello to the commander’s henchman?” His twin is standing next to him now, looking concerned.
“Not particularly.”
“Good. Let us in.”
“You’ve made your decision?”
“Yep. We’re onboard.” His face gets really close to the camera, filling up the screen. “Get it? On board?” He snorts at his own joke.
“I need you to do something for me before you come back inside.” I pull a piece of paper from my pocket. The list of materials needed for the biogrid that I lifted from Lucinda’s desk as I walked by it comes out, and I hold it up in front of my face so the twins can see its contents. “Go to Hackmore’s hardware and get me these items.”
I peek from behind the list, making sure they’re paying attention.
One of the gingers is squinting at the list. Gus. The other is looking at it normally. Bingo. Another givit. Gus needs MI for his eyes. I wonder why he hasn’t gotten it yet.
“What’s that stuff for?” the non-squinter asks.
I give him a polite, eat-my-waste smile. “Nice try, Tam, but I know Lucinda can’t possibly have been running that show behind the anteroom without a major push from engineering. Get me the parts, and I’ll let you back on the ship.”
“I’m Gus,” he says.
“Bullshit.” I pull the list away from my face and shove it back in my breast pocket.
The real Gus covers the comm unit with his hand and speaks to his brother in a hushed tone. “How’d she know?”
“How the hell do I know?” Tam whispers back. He pulls his brother’s hand off the system. “How are we supposed to pay for this stuff? Nothing’s free at Hackmore’s.”
“Tell him it’s for me. Tell him to use my workcredit on account there.”
The two gingers look at each other and smile deviously.
“And don’t even think about getting parts for the engine room without talking to me about it first. You steal from me, I remove body parts.”
Their grins disappear and the screen goes pinkish black as a hand covers the entire transponder. “She’s wicked smart,” says one of them.
“Wicked dirty is more like it,” says the other.
“That’ll work,” says the first.
The hand is gone and in its place a fuzzy smear. “Okay, Captain, we’re on it.”
“One other thing,” I say, my pulse crazy with how well this is going. “I need you to get someone for me and bring him here.”
“Who?” asks Gus, leaning toward the screen again. “Is it your boyfriend?” His body jerks to the side as he’s punched by Tam, but his focus remains on my answer.
“His name is Baebong. Ask Hackmore where he is, and he’ll tell you where to find him.”
“He a slant-eye?” Gus asks, sounding surprised.
“You got it, Captain,” says Tam, pulling his brother away from the transponder.
Gus’s voice carries through the microphone as they walk away. “I’ll bet it’s her boyfriend. You watch. Ten credits says he’s a slant-eye too.”
I press the button that now says ‘NO TALK’ and turn the chair to face Jeffers. He’s staring out the clearpanel at Langlade’s group, which has grown even larger.
“Baebong?” he asks, not looking at me.
“A friend.”
“What are we going to do about this?” He points to Langlade and the OSG official.
I sigh, not sure I want to incur the wrath of the OSG on my first day at the helm. Normally I’d tell those droid-heads to go suck it, but that was before I had a DS of my own. “Do you have any advice for me?”
“Talk to them. Hear what Langlade has to say. Do it from the ship with the door closed, though.”
“Good plan. I like your style.” I look at the buttons at my disposal and chew at my lip. Where’s the one that says ‘Talk to asshole’?
“Hit the black and blue buttons simultaneously. Dial up the dock frequency.” He points out the clearpanel to the frequency numbers floating above the dockmaster’s central hub, visible to every ship as it pulls in.
I do as he instructs and find myself speaking to some faceless voice working in the dockmaster’s domain.
“Dock Control, Operator Five-Kilo-Five-November,” the voice says.
I clear my throat before I use the standard phraseology to speak with him. “DS Anarchy here for the OSG official at Dock 5-Alpha.”
“DS Anarchy?” says the voice several seconds later. “I don’t have a DS Anarchy on the docket.”
“Formerly known as the DS Kinsblade 3,” I clarify.
“Oh. Right. Yeah, here it is. I’ll give him a call for ya. You coming dockside?”
“No, I’m on the box,” I say.
“
Got it. Good luck. Five-Kilo-Five-November, out.”
When I’m sure he’s cut the connection, I breathe in really slowly, trying to get my fears to go out with the exhale. It doesn’t work.
“Now we just have to hope that your claim holds,” Jeffers says, staring out the clearpanel at the official talking into his wrist transponder.
I get the distinct impression that Jeffers has my back, and it makes me feel just the smallest bit braver.
Chapter Eight
A BEEP RINGS OUT ON the flightdeck and a small framed box pops up in the bottom corner of the main clearpanel. Inside the box is the face of the OSG official who’s standing on the dock.
Jeffers reaches over and points to the blinking green light on my chair array that says “TALK”. He nods at me, giving me the confidence I need to press it.
“Anarchy,” I say, sounding as captain-like as I know how.
“Anarchy, this is Lieutenant Brak on the dock, just in front of you.”
“I see you there, Sir. Hello.”
“I’ve got Langlade of the Kinsblade Fleet down here claiming you’re onboard his ship without permission.”
My heart is hammering painfully in my chest and my ears are on fire. What do I say? Play stupid? Call him a liar liar pants on fire? Start shooting? I’m too freaked out to think straight and my mouth takes over. “I’m sorry to inform you, Sir, that you’ve got a damn liar on your hands.”
Surprisingly, he actually smirks and looks over his shoulder before turning back to face my ship. “Can you come out to discuss?”
“Not at this time. We have a bit of a containment breach up here, and I’d like to get it under control first.”
“Understood. Need any help with that?”
“No, we’re good.”
“I assume you have the documentation for the ship?”
I nod. Please let that damn paper be real. “I’ll send it to your unit. What’s the transmit code?”