Embrace the Romance

by S. E. Smith

  Could one of these ore-plant workers be a key-stealing spy or traitor? A mixture of ethnicities worked here. They were Goyans who weren’t space-guilders, Wendisans who for some reason lacked Citizenship, and Faxen-Unioners far away from home. Theoretically yes, especially with respect to the last group, one or more of them could be a thief or even a spy. But Faxe would certainly have screened the Unioners for Disunionist ties.

  Veda Mender, when asked about the hugwort, said yes. It was no surprise to find Veda here when almost everyone else was taking time off. As the Maintenance Chief of Star Corner Station, Veda always had more work than she and her crew could handle and spent a great deal of her time and energy just doing triage.

  She directed Daya to her dusty office off the catwalk over the Port level of the ore plant. The hugwort was in Veda’s office exploring the drawers in a tool chest. “Your plant likes to visit our plant, it does!” Veda said.

  Daya apologized to Veda and removed the hugwort. On the dimly lit catwalk outside Veda’s office, she sat down cross-legged and rifled the hugwort’s leaves and tendrils. There was grit and dust on its leaves—tailings powder, metal filings—due to it wandering through the airducts. “You need a bath,” she scolded.

  It was curious as a cat and as charmed by shiny objects as a crow. But it was more adroit than either cats or crows at opening cabinets, pockets, drawers, or airduct gratings of interest. Worse yet, it had a bad habit of carrying away objects that interested it, clutched in its tangled tendrils. Daya relieved the hugwort of two shiny fasteners, a Wendisan yen coin, a writing stylus, a bracelet—it had an incurable weakness for jewelry—and one small, hard, smooth-edged square. One of the missing keys.

  One of Jesse’s tendrils crept toward Daya’s hand, curled around the bracelet, and gave a hopeful tug. Daya held on. “This isn’t yours.” It looped another tendril around the stylus. “That isn’t either. I think it’s the one Mattiz lost last week.” The hugwort settled for extending a soft tendril tip to longingly stroke the key.

  It was a minor key, meant for—according to the lettering—unused lockers in the Cargo sublevel. It certainly wasn’t the spine access master key. But Daya had to wonder how the hugwort had gotten it. Keys were kept in biometric-secured cabinets that opened only to high ranking hands. Had this key simply gotten away from someone somewhere over the years, and the hugwort found it in some dusty corner? Or had the hugwort managed to purloin the key from a recent thief? It did seem to sense anyone’s feelings of attachment to things, which was part of why it had an unfortunate weakness for jewelry. Would the hugwort register a secretive, ill-intended attachment to a stolen thing?

  One suspicion led to another. If anything untoward happened in the next few hours—in particular any attempt by pirates to attack the Station—it would be very suspicious indeed. The war game had been long since scheduled, and predictably, everyone was now recuperating from fighting and feasting. It would not have been hard to predict that the Station would be unawares today. Only thanks to the SOS from Starway was the Station on unobtrusive full alert.

  The ore plant had a constant growl and churn of background noise. A new noise belatedly registered on Daya. Not mechanical and not the sound of rocky ore being moved around, it sounded like the rustle of wings.

  Daya jerked her head up.

  The Angel Mercury hovered in the air of the bay not far away.

  Daya suppressed a startled gasp. She had never seen the Angel outside of the passenger ring. But the cores of all the spines were hollow, and Mercury had wings to fly in spingravity. And that, she thought, explained the missing spine core assess key. The Angels must have it and with it the run of the spine cores. And that probably explained why Station personnel thought bad luck lived in the spine cores, and went there as seldom as possible.

  With wings outstretched for balance, Mercury perched on the catwalk railing. “The news of emberalm was sold to channels who sell military news to Faxe. And another thing. It isn’t pirates attacking Starway. It’s that cartel of the Faxen Union called Telal. A Telal dreadnaught vomited mercenaries into Starway. And now we’re even. You’re paid in full for all information and every hospitality. Don’t go into the ring again if you value your life.”

  Mercury launched up and soundlessly vanished into the dimness of the bay.

  Daya felt a cold, soul-shocking dread. She hugged the hugwort. It responded by wrapping its tendrils around her.

  Faxe. The coltskin glove had come off the iron fist of Faxe. If it controlled Starway, Faxe would control traffic between Goya, Wendis, and the Faxen Union—an advantageous position to say the least. The book about the history of interstellar civilization had conjectured that at some point, maybe in a century in the future and maybe less, Faxe would try to get exactly that.

  Faxe had money to buy high-quality spies too. Enough money could send people to a remote post like this to bide their time until their services were needed, maybe even keep them on a kind of retainer, just in case they ever came in useful.

  And Faxe had money to pay well for news about a game-changing weapon for the terror war. All that was left after knowing about emberalm was to actually take possession of it. . . .

  Curious at having heard voices, Veda stepped out of her office. Daya numbly showed her the bracelet, the fasteners and the stylus. “That’s none of it mine,” Veda said. “But I’ve been missing two good tools for a while! Does your hugwort have a nest where it keeps its little treasures?”

  “No, it just clutches them in its tendrils and carries them around. I’ve found everything it’s got today.”

  “My tools may have spin-slid into cracks somewhere in this great scrapheap.” With that, Veda went on her way.

  The sound of a massive door sliding open came across the ore bay below. The latest load of tailings had been funneled into a hauler, the hauler shifted along its track to the door of a materials port. Visible through the outer door was an inner door that opened onto an airlock. With the hauler in the lock, the inner door sealed behind it. Air would be sucked out and tailings powder in the air filtered out. Then the spaceside door would iris open and the hauler would be launched toward Trove. The catapult was steerable to compensate for the precession of the Station in its orbit. The catapult gave the hauler a shove to head it back to Trove.

  The process was boringly routine. Veda hadn’t even spared it a glance. Arriving ore was a more attention-getting, understandably—anything coasting toward the Station got attention until it was safely caught in the cables of the ore yard and eased in through a port. Haulers taking tailings back to Trove, on the other hand, were a repetitious and unexciting fact of life here. And it took long enough in the launch port that illicit bubbles could probably be surreptitiously sent and received as well, Daya thought. The Stations’ sensors would never even notice. The Station’s sensory apparatus was truncated from what it had once been. Truncated and stupid.

  That needed to change, if it wasn’t already too late.

  Four

  Rik was glad he was here, even if for no real reason. In the silence of the Grave, he looked out at a vast swath of the stars and nebulosity of space. The wide view came as an ice-cold comfort to him. It confirmed the changed state of his life. His career had given him only a narrow, confining future in a universe of stars and possibilities. It had felt as safe as it was narrow—like the asteroid-protected windows in the corridors of the ore plant. Now, though. . . .

  Movement caught his eye. It was that anomalous passenger ring on the next spine over. He had a good and rather close view of it from here. As he watched, at least four pieces of the passenger ring broke off and drifted away. The further away they drifted, the more the outlines of the pieces blurred, reflecting nebula light strangely, and maybe even changing shape.

  He found the access slot in the communicator and put Daya’s disk into it. The communicator woke up with a quick flicker of self-check and ready lights. He entered her code—twice two—and she answered immediately. “What is
it, auditor?” Her voice sounded guarded.

  “The old passenger ring did something odd.” He described it.

  “Where are the pieces?” She sounded startled.

  “Nowhere to be seen.” He could hear soft voices behind her speaking with two different male accents. It sounded like he’d found her in a conference with Jax and Romeo. They went silent when she said, “Call up Station visuals on the old passenger ring!”

  “The Station monitor hasn’t flagged anything,” Jax said.

  “Monitors can be compromised. I want to see what it actually looks like now.” A moment later, she said, “Six missing pieces, Rik, none of them registering on the monitor, all gone. Our monitor is either malfunctioning or compromised.”

  Rik thought he heard Romeo say, “The angels have left us,” but that made no sense.

  It also made no sense that Daya said something about rats leaving a sinking ship. Then she spoke to him again. “Rik, you have that disk with my handprint on it. Look for the access slot in the central console and put the security disk in. And keep watching. And thank you.”

  Thank you. The words went through Rik like electricity. That told him in no uncertain terms that he’d gone past being attracted to Daya. He’d fallen in love with her. To what end, he did not know. He did not even know what to hope for.

  Indicator lights raced across the bank of consoles. Rik watched self-checks going on, then the lights stabilized. Interesting—the Grave was waking up. Evidently it wasn’t a real grave, more like cold storage for the array of machines no longer needed to run the station. In any event, the machines had no attention to spare for him. With the exception of the communicator, his touch on plates and switches had absolutely no effect.

  Meanwhile he watched outside more warily than before.

  He saw the starship when it first reached real space, its initial shining almost blindingly bright, the light glaring on the Station’s surfaces and throwing black shadows. He used the communicator again. “Daya, are there freighters scheduled for today?”

  “One late tonight.” Her voice sounded as though she were speaking in a large and hollow place now, not her office, or for that matter, her living room. “That one is a freighter of Goyan registry, near midnight.” Loud scraping sounds and a metallic clatter nearly drowned her out.

  “Any ships scheduled to come here in Station-day?”

  “No, Rik. Why?”

  “There’s one out there.”

  Don’t see this, ill Fate. Daya let that thought cross her mind, then told it to go away, the better not to attract Fate’s attention even by careless thinking.

  With the wargame over, empty containers were being carried out of the Recreation Center and back to Cargo sector. The three tailings trucks had to go back to the ore plant. Jax, Romeo and Brina had one of them already moving along on a haulway. “We’re tidying up, we are!” Brina called cheerfully. “We got the one from the war with the red stuff, all cleaned up, it is!”

  “Thank you all for handling that,” Daya told them. She meant it.

  Don’t see this, ill Fate.

  Daya ran for the vator to the Grave.

  She hoped against hope that the arriving ship was a Goyan freighter that had been left out of the schedule. Even more likely, it might be the one scheduled to arrive tonight, having starjumped faster than planned. That could happen if the freighter had to dodge some kind of danger or had a certain kind of engine malfunction.

  Rik was standing by the window of the Grave. “Was there a Faxen military transport scheduled to visit the station? Do they ever just drop in on you?”

  Dread clawed Daya’s nerves. “No and not likely at all.”

  “Daya, this isn’t good. Let me explain—”

  “No. I know.”

  One of his eyebrows went up.

  “Starway was attacked by the Telal Cartel—by the mercenary arm of the Cartel.”

  His other eyebrow went up.

  “Believe me or not as you wish.”

  “Oh, I believe you.” He turned back to the window. Evidently he’d been watching so closely that he hadn’t realized that she’d locked him into the control room a while ago.

  “Faxe must have decided to strong-arm its way to the power it wants to feel safe from terror.”

  He gave a stiff shrug. “That’s an excuse. The real goal is Imperial Faxe.”

  He knew. And was he on the side of Imperial Faxe? How could she tell? The questions howled in her mind. She stepped to the window beside him. “But where is it?”

  “Hard to see. Look for the starship-shaped hole in the nebula.”

  It was a big, featureless spindle shape, barely visible in front of the nebula backdrop, inching toward the Cargo sector dock. “I ordered the docks to go to an ask-and-answer basis.” Everything seemed unreal, including her own voice speaking those words. “The dock controllers should query the intentions of any approaching ship, scheduled freighter or otherwise, and they should explain their intentions and be approved to dock. Or not.”

  “Good idea. If it works. They may have friends in your ranks.” His voice was grim.

  He knows that too. Daya was acutely conscious of her right boot with the long, slender dagger in its slim pocket. Most non-Steppe people were ignorant of the lethality of a dagger. True, Rik Gole had some martial arts. But she knew how to use the dagger at close range and how to throw it. He didn’t stand much of a chance if she had to kill him. And if he tried to stop her from protecting the Station, she would. For once in her life, it was hard to frame words. She forced out, “What about you, Darik-Arn Gole? Are you one of those friends?”

  “No.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “I thought you’d ask that.” He held out three bubble-clones. Mattiz hadn’t seen Rik’s three messages, but their clone-copies would be dated and watermarked—a very hard thing to fake. As if he understood her intense wariness, he stepped away and turned his back to her. “I assume Faxe wants to rid itself of your Station. The idea may be to first take possession, then open it under new management, then decommission it. The transport is approaching like it means to dock with no questions answered.”

  Daya looked at what he had put in her hand.

  His messages addressed to the Station authorities in Goya and Wendis said that FINFINA had ordered him to find specific malfeasance in the management of Star Corner Station and that he had refused to obey that order and resigned from his position. The message to FINFINA said the same thing, only couched as a direct communication to his employer of the fact that he was resigning his position, and why.

  Incredulous, she touched his shoulder.

  He wheeled toward her.

  “You sent this.”

  He pointed to the watermark, which was proof positive. But that wasn’t really what she was asking. In his eyes she saw heat lightning from a storm in his soul.

  The communicator suddenly blared. “Attention all personnel and visitors in Star Corner Station. Prepare for an important announcement.”

  Rik grimaced. “That was quick work. They’ve commandeered the communications channels. Intelligence operatives know how to do that.”

  Daya pointed at the console, where lights flashed. “The Station’s communication Intelligence is fighting back. The Intelligences here were built in the Terror and designed to protect the Station.”

  He shook his head, though not, as it turned out, at what she’d said. “This situation doesn’t make sense. The report I was ordered to write would provide enough of a rationale for a routine appropriation of the Station. That’s a civilian action maybe backed up by lightly armed detachment. You don’t send a military transport for that. Maybe it was what was available, but a transport can carry fifty soldiers.” His frown deepened. “It’s unmarked, no insignia, and no daya—it doesn’t reflect light. That may mean it’s an unlisted ship for flights to nowhere. In other words, covert operations directed by SECINTAG, the Faxen secret intelligence agency.”

 
It was she who knew the right question now. “What would they send to get emberalm for their terror war?”

  Rik whirled back toward the window. “How would they know about it? I didn’t say anything—and there are the bubble-clones to prove it. Do you have a spy sending unauthorized bubbles?”

  “Possibly, but that’s not how the Faxen military got news of the emberalm. I’ll explain later. You’ve helped me make a decision,” she heard herself say. “Thanks to the communications Intelligence, there are channels that are still mine.” She touched the communicator to open one such channel. A machine voice softly said, “Secure.” Daya said, “Jax, are you there? Can you do it?”

  “Secure.” Then Jax said, “Yes, Manager.”

  Watched by Rik, she swallowed hard. She’d never done anything like this—or in her wildest nightmares thought she’d need to. With infinite reluctance, she forced herself to touch a sequence of icons on the ore plant operations console. Lights continued to flash after she lifted her hand.

  Then she heard Jax groan. “Manager, that didn’t work, your remote override didn’t work! Veda!”

  Daya heard Veda Mender say, “Yes?” in a harried voice. “Now what?”

  “The Manager tried to send an override in from the Control Room and it didn’t work. Maybe a circuit is broken.”

  “If so there’s a kilometer of circuit to check and all of it in sealed explosion-proof casing!” Veda sounded shocked. “I couldn’t inspect a circuit like that in two days and a night!”

  Jax said, “Manager, can you come up here? I’ll need your hand to make the override work. At least I think it will work then.”

  Never in her life had Daya had such mixed feelings. Relief that the ancient override circuitry wasn’t working—I’ll not have to do it—and anger that it wasn’t working—I have to do it. Wanting to stay safe here in the Control Room, which could be sealed off from anything much short of a thermonuclear explosion. And angry dread because Jax was right. If she were going to do what she’d hoped not to do, she had to leave the safety of this place. “I’ve got to go to the ore plant,” she told Rik.