by Mike Moscoe
• • •
“Captain, there’s a civilian on the quarterdeck. Says he has to see you.”
Three and a half weeks into this refit, Izzy was beginning to entertain hope. Matters between the Patton and the yard were going far better than she had any right to expect. With a sigh, Izzy figured she was about due for something to go wrong.
“This civilian have a name?” she asked. With everybody busy, they must have a raw trainee standing the watch.
“He won’t give it to me,” came the plaintive response.
“Visual on quarterdeck,” Izzy snapped. A picture of the Patton’s quarterdeck, an elevator gaping in the background replaced the report she’d been mulling over. “Zoom to upper center,” she ordered, not believing her eyes. Hm! If he didn’t want his name in the log, she’d go along. “Provide the civilian with an escort to my day cabin,” she ordered. She wiped her screen, made sure she had nothing she didn’t want visible, then met her guest at the bridge hatch.
“Thank you for seeing me.”
“Joe Edris, what the hell are you doing here? You’re a long way from Hurtford Corner.”
“Yes, and so is my daughter, I fear.”
Izzy took the time to get Joe settled in a chair across the coffee table from her, then ordered coffee and sandwiches.
“Thanks, I’m starved. I made this trip on a shoestring.”
“How did you make it at all?” Izzy asked incredulously.
“Mr. Withwaterson, you remember him, finally gave up and called in a ship to pick him up. Turns out an ATF agent has a certain call on ships for official transportation. Using nothing more than the ID card you issued, I wrangled myself aboard his ship headed back to Pitt’s Hope. From there to here. I imagine when somebody audits their bills I’ll be in a hell of a mess, but that can wait. My daughter can’t.”
“What happened?”
“Damned if I know. For the first ten days after you left, everything was wonderful. My wife even forgave me. Then one morning we woke up to find more than fifty people gone. Some maybe went voluntarily, but Ruth didn’t. It was a slap at us. Show us we couldn’t protect our own. I heard a sonic boom from a shuttle late that night. Seemed strange. Stranger when it left before dawn. Come morning, Ruth’s room was empty. A Miss Uzeg, city manager’s new girl friend and granddaughter to one of the new elders, was gone too. They slapped us in the face with a club. I was the only one on Hurtford Corner that had any chance of getting here. They all, city elders, station elders, my wife, want your help.”
“You didn’t message?”
“Withwaterson’s ship was due that day. I figured I could get here as fast as any message. Besides, Izzy, I want to get my hands on the people who did this. Can you help me?”
“As it turns out, yes. I and a lot of other people are already doing all we can. As soon as the Patton’s out of the yard, it heads for the planet where your daughter probably is. Lieutenant Tordon is already out there, doing a predrop recon. We’re going to take those slavers apart.”
“I hope he doesn’t run into Ruth. That could be a mess.”
“Damn, let me see if I can get a message out to him.” Izzy hit her comm link. “Get me Elie Miller.”
Quickly Izzy explained the problem to Elie. It took a long five minutes to connect the call with the still unnamed spy. He listened, shaking his head before Izzy was half done. “That is something we cannot do. They should be at Riddle already. Any message will get there too late. Your lieutenant will have to tough this one out on his own. Mr. Edris, I am very sorry about your daughter. My analysts had a strong hunch that several of the hard-hit planets would be in for further attention. Hurtford Corner is rich in mineral resources. They want you, and they’ve just let you know they will not let a minor setback take you off their hit list.”
“That’s what I figured, too. Izzy, you got a berth aboard for an ATF agent?”
Izzy always had room for a good man. “I’ll see what I can do.” Well, Trouble, you’re deep in it again. Take care, boy.
NINE
THE SECOND THE Loki jumped into the Riddle system, Trouble activated the pod. An hour later, Captain Hood dropped by. “What you getting, boy?”
“Not a hell of a lot. No electronic signals at all from the planet?”
Hood came over and fiddled with Trouble’s board. “Never can be too sure with these things. Hm, right. Nothing! Damn planet must have one hell of a fiber backbone. It’s radiating nothing but reflected light.”
“We ought to be able to pick up something from comm links.”
“Not if they’re really low power. Means a lot of repeaters, but if you don’t want your communications monitored, you do it that way.”
“Well, there’s got to be some high-powered communication between the planet and the station. Shuttles in between. Something.”
“Doesn’t look like it.” Hood double-checked one of Trouble’s readouts. “No, no shuttles in transit at the moment. The station is in a low, two-hour orbit. Maybe they only talk to it when it’s above the horizon.”
“Hold it.” Trouble sat forward, tapping one monitor. “There’s a Global Positioning System. Okay, and there’s a weather satellite. Maybe more when we get closer.”
Three days later, they knew little more. “GPS and weather satellite system. Nothing else,” Trouble reported to Hood. “I’ve got the main urban area decently mapped”—he glanced at his own readout—“but I’d like a second orbit to verify it.”
“Oh, darn,” came with no emotion from the ship public address. “We seem to have lost a gyro. Clobbering my burn. If I don’t get it fixed real soon, I just might lose my window to the station this orbit. Henry, could you fix that for me?”
“Boss, you ain’t given me time to fix the last one that went south on us. Unless you want to try and park this thing with bum gyros, you’re gonna have to give me a while.”
“Well, get a move on. Time is money.”
Trouble laughed; he got three extra passes. The station was no more eager than Henry to have a ship with a bad gyro sidling up close where a sudden failure could mean a lot of bent metal and composites. While the Loki was station-keeping with the orbital base, Trouble finally got a brief glimpse of the ground-to-station tight beam. Very tight, and encrypted from the sound of it. God, these guys are paranoid.
By the time they docked, Trouble felt good. He had solid visual, electronic, and infrared scans. He might not have intercepted any message traffic, but he had a good handle on where the electric motors, hot sites, and surface disturbances were. As expected, there was a lot of agricultural land, most of it well to the north of the urban sprawl that was centered on a plateau in the southern hemisphere. Mineral extraction showed at a few scattered points, very few. The planet was early in its development and had few mountains. Didn’t look like it had a lot of plate tectonic activity, nothing to stir the minerals from the core to the crust.
Just before docking, Trouble finally intercepted signals from two ships also on approach. They’d arrived by different jump points; this system had too many jump points for Trouble’s taste. Too many sources for surprise.
“Unusual for them to be quiet so long,” Hood advised him, “but the chatter sounds pretty normal now. One claims to have passengers from the core worlds. Other one says it’s just cargo from around the rim.”
“Cargo?” Trouble asked.
“That’s what they say.”
“We’ll see.”
The three extra orbits they’d taken meant that they would see. Captain Hood prided himself on getting in and out of ports fast, before a customs agent could get too interested in him. Riddle Station was small, maintaining about half a gee’s worth of fake gravity. Cargo would be easy to move around; Trouble was assigned to help with it as soon as he’d made his first crack at getting past the firewall. Two minutes told him Tru’s info war program was dead in its tracks.
Stopped there, Trouble slipped the second disk into his pocket and joined the other six
hands moving cargo off as quickly as the captain wanted. The Loki was not a container ship. Still, Pier Two seemed designed for such small ships. The large cargo hatch to the Loki’s second hold was open, mated to a simple expansion tube from the station. A cable snaked down from the station, limp and curling in half a gee. The crew manhandled eight crates as tall and wide as a man and four times as long. Officially, they were full of miscellaneous high-value goods—videos, wines, other delicacies that couldn’t be made locally. Trouble hadn’t asked what they really had; some things were best left unknown. Each crate was shoved into a line at the hatch, one behind the other. Then the first one was hitched to the line.
“Trouble, Ken, and Hab, ride this one topside, take care of that half of the business,” Hood ordered. “Trouble, you handle the manifest.” That would get him up close to a computer he could feed Tru’s second disk. The firewall had stopped him; could this disk break the encryption? Trouble and the other two rode the first crate up, hanging on to the central line.
In half a gee, it was easy to hop off, then capture the loose line that let them pull the container away from the hatch and toward a waiting collection of wheeled cradles. While the others bolted the container down, Trouble lowered the cable, then found the cargo computer and fed it Tru’s disk. Central control acknowledged the info dump, verified that the weight of the first container matched the manifest, and cleared them to offload the rest of the cargo. They were not to put any cargo on the conveyor moving along the far wall of the concourse. “In use,” he was advised. He activated Tru’s first “war” program.
While the computer hummed and the next crate worked its way up, Trouble examined his surroundings. A large ship had docked just ahead of him at the next pier to his right. Several passenger elevators disgorged a mixed bag of travelers, who were motioned over to the single conveyor.
“You mean we have to use the cargo belt?” one disheveled passenger complained.
“Listen, Art, we’re drawing double the pay we were. So we have to rough it a bit. It’s only for three years. Relax, man.”
“You said this place had everything. Open air, top service, good housing, even swimming pools. You better have this right.”
“Trust me, Art. Have I ever done you wrong?”
Which left Trouble wondering who had done whom. That didn’t sound like the kind of job and quarters the boss had been promising him and Ruth. Was somebody in for a surprise? Were there two levels of employment here? Interesting.
The first program gave a defeated beep. Trouble initiated the second, then went to handle the next container. Halfway through the fourth container, that one also beeped that it was whipped. As he finished processing that container, all the foot traffic from his right dried up. A docking horn went off to his left. The second ship was coming in.
Tru’s final program was still trying, and he was pushing the last of the Loki’s containers around, when the dock to his left started disgorging passengers. No elevator for this bunch; they were dragged up a cargo chute, attached to a single cable. Like his containers, they were collected tightly in an area next to the conveyor. There were a lot of them, well over a hundred.
One of them was Ruth.
Trouble’s gut went into free fall. The woman was filthy; the stink from the slave ship spread through the concourse. Still, her walk, the carriage of her shoulders, all of it fit just one woman…Ruth.
Shock turned to anger. God damn it! Not again!
Trouble fought emotions to keep his head down and push the last container while the other two pulled. Observe and report back. Son of a bitch, he didn’t even have a sidearm on him. He was eyes today, he snapped at himself bitterly, not power projection. Hell of a situation.
The conveyor was moving now, bringing six containers toward Trouble. “Great, our cargo’s right on time,” Ken said happily as he got in place to snag the arriving canisters. Trouble joined him, keeping his back to Ruth except for the few furtive glances he couldn’t help but cast her way, trying to see if it was her, hoping the next peek would show it wasn’t.
It was her.
As soon as they had their cargo off the slide, the slaves were pushed and shoved onto it. Ruth flowed by him, her eyes downcast, her dirty face empty. It took everything Trouble had not to call out to her, do something to give her hope. This won’t last long, honey.
He turned to the loading with a will. Ken stopped him. “Trouble, help me check this stuff before we stow it.”
Together, the two of them broke the seal on the containers and looked inside. “Count them,” Ken ordered. So Trouble climbed up on the lip of the container where he could see the tops of the metal Dewars and started counting.
“Fifty by my count. What’s in them?”
“Money for us. Dreams for someone else.”
Oh, shit, I’m shipping drugs. That spy was one big bastard.
“When we lift the containers, check the weight. We know what these things should weigh. They’d better.”
“Right, boss,” Trouble told Ken as he resealed the container. Ken sauntered off to check the contents of the rest with Hab. Trouble was weighing the first one when the slave ship disgorged its last passengers.
These two were freshly washed and well dressed. A short man had his arm around the waist of a tall blonde as they slowly made their way to the conveyor. Her high-pitched laugh carried through the concourse.
“We showed them, didn’t we?”
“Yes, my dear, we did indeed. I think with us you have finally found your proper place. Ah, what lays before us.” The slight emphasis on the “lay” spoke volumes to Trouble. The woman smiled down at her confident friend. Trouble studied her for a second, then turned away. I’ve seen her before. Not a lot. He had no name to go with the face. Still, he had met her. Since she was on the same ship that had carried Ruth, he searched his recollections of Hurtford Corner. He’d met so many people in such a short amount of time.
Public safety! That woman had helped him arrange the security for the dance. The dance he’d been kidnapped at. Hadn’t the skipper mentioned someone in Hurtford’s Office of Public Safety who had cleared all the questionable crews for mountain travel? Zylon something. Trouble kept his head down. He hadn’t said anything to Ruth; he damn sure had nothing to say to this woman. Not yet. Not until he had a full assault team behind him. Then they’d talk. He smiled to himself.
The crew was just lifting the first container as the couple flowed by them on the conveyor. “What’s the weight?” Ken called.
“One point three six kilos above tare,” Trouble answered, looking up from his screen. Ken nodded. Behind him, the woman on the conveyor glanced at the work party, then ruffled her associate’s thin crown of hair. “Yes, Big Al, I can’t wait to see what kind of job your friends have waiting for me.”
Trouble’s heart skipped a beat as he snapped his eyes back to the numbers. They hadn’t made eye contact; he was just one of several dockworkers. Right? She was looking forward to her new life, not to holdovers from the last one. He hoped.
As one container went into the ship, one of the arriving ones went onto the belt. Trouble was pretty sure that somewhere, someone was watching. Making sure all was exchanged per agreements. “Trusting lot,” he murmured.
They were loading down the second-to-last container when Trouble saw his first evidence that people actually worked on the station. A thin, small man in a white shirt and black slacks came galloping up to Ken. “There’s a discrepancy with one of your manifests. Your container is ten kilos short.”
“That’s not bloody likely,” Ken snapped. “T, you weighed them on the lift out. Call up their weights for this man.”
The hackles on the back of Trouble’s neck rose for no apparent reason. Two men in blue jumpsuits, bags thrown over their backs, exited the passenger ship. They started walking down the concourse, going against the slide. Trouble called up the weights. “Hey, they’re good matches. You have to double them to take into account the reduced ‘gravity
’ here, but our cargo’s the same as when we got it.”
Now three spacers in ragtag civvies hustled out of the slaver, cutting a diagonal toward the slide. Trouble’s alarm bells were ringing now. By his estimate, they’d arrive at the conveyor about where Ken was standing. Coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidence.
The unhappy accountant waved his reader. “Number four weighed in light at my station. I got to talk to your captain.”
Ken scowled as he hit his comm link. “Skipper, we got an accountant up here who doesn’t like the weight of our cargo.”
“I’ll be there in a second.”
A large man in a brown suit was now briskly walking down the slide. Trouble’s quick analysis of trajectories put him, the two spacers, and the other three here no more than a second apart. What he’d give for the automatic he’d been ordered to leave behind. “If you get in trouble, you won’t be able to shoot your way out of it,” the spy had insisted. Maybe Trouble couldn’t, but given the developing situation, he’d rather try than not.
Captain Hood was hoisted up about the time the brown suit arrived. “Hi, Captain, I’m Gunter Hammerman.” He held out a beefy hand. “I need to discuss a matter with you.”
“Always looking for new business,” the skipper replied heartily, taking the hand and shaking it firmly. The five walkers arrived. They came to a halt, surrounding the Loki’s four men like crows on a fresh battlefield. From the far end of the conveyor, a half dozen men in gray coveralls were jogging toward them now. Trouble blinked as sweat ran into his eyes; the odds were bad and getting worse. He popped the disk; with no place to dump it, he slipped it into his back pocket.
“We wonder what business you may have taken on.”
“Nothing that’s eaten into your business,” Hood assured him.