Planet Pirates Omnibus

by neetha Napew

  “Good. Had Abe lived, he would have made sure you knew how to contact some of its members. But, as it was, no one knew you well enough to trust you, even with your background. This meeting should remedy that.”

  “But then you ...”

  Fleur’s smile this time had an edge of bitterness. “I have my own story. We all do. If there’s time, you’ll hear mine. For now, know that I knew Abe, and loved him dearly, and I have watched your career, as it appears in the news, with great interest.”

  “But how . . .”As she spoke, the door opened again, and three women came in, chattering gaily. Fleur stood at once and greeted them, smiling. Sassinak, uncertain, sat where she was. The women, it seemed, had come in hopes of finding Fleur free. They glanced at Sassinak, then away, saying that they simply must have Fleur’s advice on something of great importance.

  “Why of course,” she said. “Do come into my sitting room.” One of them must have murmured something about Sassinak, for she said, “No, no. Mirelle will be right back to speak to the commander.”

  Mirelle reappeared, as if by magic, bearing a tray with tiny sandwiches and cookies in fanciful shapes.

  “Fleur says you’re quite welcome to stay, but she

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  doesn’t think she’ll be free for several hours. That’s an old customer, with her daughters-in-law, and they come to gossip as much as for advice. She’s very sorry. You will have a snack, won’t you?”

  For courtesy’s sake, Sassinak took a sandwich. Mirelle hovered, clearly uneasy about something. When Sassinak insisted on leaving, Mirelle exhibited both disappointment and relief.

  “You.will come again?”

  “When I can. Please tell Fleur I was honored to meet her, but I can’t say when I’ll be able to come onplanet again.”

  That should give Sassinak time to think, and if she hadn’t made a decision by the next required conference, she could always go by a different street. Outside again, she found herself thinking again of Dupaynil, simply because of his specialties. She wished she had some way of getting into the databases herself, without going through Aygar, and without being detected. She would like very much to know who “Fleur de Paris” was, and why her name was supposed to be a joke.

  In his days on the Zaid-Dayan, Dupaynil would have sworn that he was capable of intercepting any data link and resetting any control panel on any ship. All he had to do was reconfigure the controls on the escort vessel’s fifteen escape pods so that he could control them. It should have been simple. It was not simple. He had not slept but for the briefest naps. He dared not sleep until it was done. And yet he had to appear to sleep, as he appeared to eat, to play cards, to chat idly, to take the exercise that had become regular to him, up and down the ladders.

  He had no access to the ship’s computer, no time to himself in the compartments where his sabotage would have been easiest. He had to do it all from his tiny cabin, in the few hours he could legitimately be alone, “sleeping.”

  And they had already found one of his taps. It frightened him in a way he had never been frightened before. He was good at the minutiae of his work, one of

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  die neatest, his instructors had said, a natural. To have a but like Ollery find one of his taps meant that he had been clumsy and careless. Or he had misjudged them, another way of being clumsy and careless.

  He would not have lived this long had he really been clumsy or careless, but he had depended on the confii-sion, the complexity, of large ships. Fear only made his hands shake. Coldly, he considered himself as if he were a new trainee in Methods of Surveillance. Think, he told himself, the nervous trainee. You have die brains or they wouldn’t have assigned you here. Use your wits. He set aside the odds against him. Beyond “high,” what good were precise percentages? He considered the whole problem. He simply had to get those escape pods slaved to his control.

  A crew which had spent five years together on a ship this small would know everything, would notice everything, especially as they now suspected him. But since they were already planning to space him, would they really worry about his taps? Wouldn’t they, instead, snigger to each other about his apparent progress, enjoy letting him think he was spying on them, while knowing that nothing he found would ever be seen? He thought they would.

  The question was, when would they spring their trap, and could he spring his before? And assuming he did gain control of the escape pods, so that they could not eject his, and he could eject theirs, he still had to get them all into the pods. They would know—at least die captain and mate would know—that the evacuation drill was a fake. So there was a chance, a good chance, that they would not be in pods at all. But thinking this far had quieted the tremor in his hands and cured his dry mouth.

  Wiring diagrams and logic relays flicked through his mind, along with die possible modifications a renegade crew might have made. His audio tap into the captain’s cabin still functioned. Listening on a still operative tap, he learned diat the one that die mate had discovered had fallen victim to a rare bout of cleaning. As far as he knew, and as far as they said, they had not found any of

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  the others. On the other hand, he had found two of theirs. He left them alone, unworried.

  The personal kit he always had with him included the very best antisurveillance chip, bonded to his shaver. Through his own taps, he picked his way delicately toward control functions. Some were too well guarded for his limited set of tools. He could not lock the captain in his cabin, or shut off air circulation to any crew compartment. He could not override the captain’s control of bridge access. He knew they were watching, suspecting just such a trick. He could not roam die computer’s files too broadly, eidier. But he could get into such open files as the maintenance and repair records, and find that the galley hatch had repeatedly jammed. As an experiment, to see if he could do it widiout anyone noticing, Dupaynil changed die pressure on the upper hatch runner. It should jam, and be repaired, widi only a few cusswords for die pesky thing.

  Sure enough, one of the crew complained bitterly through breakfast that the galley hatch was catching again. It was probably diat double-damned pressure sensor on die upper runner. Hie mate nodded and assigned someone to fix it.

  On such a small vessel, the escape pods were studded along eidier side of die main axis: three opening directly from die bridge, and the others aft, six accessed from the main and six from die alternate passage. Escape drill required each crew member to find an assigned pod, even if working near another. Pod assignments were posted in both bridge and galley.

  Dupaynil tried to remember if anyone had actually survived a hull-breach on an escort, and couldn’t think of an instance. The pods were there because regulations said every ship would carry diem. That didn’t make them practical. Pod controls on escort ships were die old-fashioned electro-mechanical relays; proof against magnetic surges from EM weapons which could disable more sophisticated controls by scrambling die wits of their controlling chips.

  This simplicity meant that the tools he had were

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  enough. Although, if someone looked, the changes would be more obvious than a reprogrammed or replacement chip. Fiddling with the switches and relays also took longer than changing a chip, and he found it difficult to stay suave and smiling when a crew member happened by as he was finishing one of the links.

  The final step, slaving all the pod controls to one, and that one to his handcomp, tested the limits of his ability. He was almost sure die system would work. Unhappily, he would not know until he tried it. He was ready, as ready as he could be. He would have preferred to set off the alarm himself, but he dared not risk it. He played his usual round of cards with Ollery and the mate, making sure that he played neither too well nor too badly, and declined a dice game.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, with the blithe assurance of one who expects the morrow to arrive on schedule. “I can’t stand all this excitement in one night.”

  They chuckled,
the easy chuckle of the predator whose prey is in the trap. He went out wondering when they’d spring it. He really wanted a full shift’s sleep.

  The shattering noise of the alarm- and die flashing lights woke him from the uneasy doze he’d allowed himself. He pulled on his pressure suit, lurched into die bulkhead, cursing, and staggered out into die passage. There was the mate, grinning. It was not a friendly grin.

  “Escape pod drill, Lieutenant Commander! Remember your assignment?”

  “Fourteen, starboard, next hatch but one.”

  “Right, sir. Go on now!” The mate had a handcomp, and appeared to be logging die response to die drill.

  It could not be diat The computer automatically logged crew into and out of the escape pods. Dupaynil moved quickly down the passage, hearing the thump and snarled curses of odiers on their way to die pods. He let himself into die next hatch but one, die pod he hoped was not only safely under his control, but now gave him control of the others.

  On such a small ship, the drill required everyone to stay in die pods until all had reported in. Dupaynil listened to die ship’s com as die pods filled. He

  GENERATION WARBIORS

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  diat die captain would preserve the fiction of a real drill. If nothing else, to cover his tracks with his Exec, and actually enter and lock off his own pod.

  Things could get very sticky indeed if the captain discovered before entering his own pod, diat Dupaynil had some of his crew locked away. Four were already “podded” when Dupaynil checked in. He secured dieir pods. It might be better to wait until everyone was in. But if some came out, then he’d be in worse trouble. If tiiey obeyed the drill procedures, diey wouldn’t know they were locked in until he had full control.

  One after another, so quickly he had some trouble to keep up widi diem, the others made it into dieir pods and dogged die hatches. Eight, nine (die senior mate, he was glad to notice). Only the officers and one enlisted left.

  “Captain! There’s something . . .”

  The senior mate. Naturally. Dupaynil had not been able to interfere with die ship’s intercom and reconfigure the pod controls. The mate must have planned to duck into his pod just long enough to register his presence on die computer, then come out to help die captain space Dupaynil.

  Even as die mate spoke, Dupaynil activated all his latent sensors. Detection be damned! They knew he was onto diem, and he needed all die data he could get. His control locks had better work! He was out of his own escape pod, widi a tiny button-phone in his ear and his hand-held control panel.

  Ollery and Panis were on the bridge. Even as Dupaynil moved forward, the last crewman checked into his pod and Dupaynil locked it down. Apparently he hadn’t heard die mate.

  That left the captain and that very new executive officer who would probably believe whatever the cap-tain told him. He dogged down the hatch of his escape pod manually. From the corridor, it would look as if he were in it.

  Go forward and confront the captain? No. He had to ensure that the others, especially the mate, stayed locked in. His fix might hold against a manual unlocking, but

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  might not. So his first move was to the adjoining pods where he smashed the control panels beside each hatch. Pod fourteen, his own, was aftmost on the main corridor side, which meant he could ensure that no enemy appeared behind him. He would have to work his way back and forth between corridors though. Luckily the fifteenth pod was empty, and so was the thirteenth. Although the pods were numbered without using traditionally unlucky thirteen, most crews avoided the one that would have been thirteen. Stupid superstition, Dupaynil thought, but it helped him now.

  Although he was sure he remembered which crew members were where, he checked on his handcomp and disabled the mate’s pod controls next. Pod nine was off the alternate passage. He’d had to squeeze through a connecting passage and go forward past “14A” (the unlucky one) and pod eleven. From there he went back to disable pod eleven and checked to be sure the other two on that side were actually empty. It was not unknown for a lazy crewmember to check into the nearest unassigned pod.

  He wondered all the while just what the captain was doing. Not to mention the Exec. If only he’d been able to get a mil-channel tap on the bridge! He had just edged into the narrow cross passage between the main and alternate passages when he heard a feint noise and saw an emergency hatch slide across in front of him. Ollery had put the ship on alert, with full partitioning.

  / should have foreseen that, Dupaynil thought. With a frantic lurch, he got his hands on its edge. The safety valve hissed at him but held the door still while he wriggled through the narrow gap. Now he was in the main corridor. Across from him he could see the recesses for pods ten and eight. He disabled their manual controls, one after another, working as quickly as he could but not worrying about noise. Just aft, another partition had come down, gray steel barrier between him and the pods fiirther aft. But, when he first got out, he had disabled pod twelve. Just forward, another.

  A thin hiss, almost at the edge of his hearing, stopped him just as he reached it. None of the possibilities

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  looked good. He knew that Ollery could evacuate the air from each compartment and his pressure suit had only a two-hour supply. Less, if he was active. Explosive decompression wasn’t likely, though he had no idea just how fast emergency decomp was. He had not sealed his bubble-helmet. He’d wanted to hear whatever was there to be heard. That hiss could be Ollery or Panis cutting through the partition with a weapon, something like a needier.

  In the short stretch of corridor between the partitions, he had no place to hide. All compartment hatches sealed when the ship was on alert. Even if he had been able to get into the galley, it offered no concealment. Two steps forward, one back. What would Sassinak have done in his place? Found an access hatch, no doubt, or known something about the ship’s controls that would have let her get out of this trap and ensnare Ollery at the same time. She would certainly have known where every pipe went and what was in it, what each wire and switch was for. Dupaynil could think of nothing.

  It was interesting, if you looked at it that way, that Ollery hadn’t tried to contact him on the ship’s intercom. Did he even know Dupaynil was out of the pod? He must. He had normal ship’s scans available in every compartment. Dupaynil’s own sensors showed that the pods he had sealed were still sealed, their occupants safely out of the fight. Two blobs erf light on a tiny screen were the captain and Panis on the bridge, right ; where they should be. Then one of them started down the alternate passage, slowly. He could not tell which it was, but logic said the captain had told Panis to investigate. Logic smirked when Ollery’s voice came over the tatercom only moments later.

  “Check every compartment. I want voice report on fnything out of the ordinary.”

  “ He could not hear the Jig’s reply. He must be wear-; fag a pressure suit and using its com unit to report. .Didn’t the captain realize that Dupaynil could hear the ^intercom? Or didn’t he care? Meanwhile there was his problem: that emergency partition. Dupaynil de-

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  cided that the hissing was merely an air leak between compartments, an ill-fitting partition, and set to work to override its controls.

  Several hot, sweaty minutes later, he had the thing shoved back in its recess, and edged past. The main passage forward looked deceptively ordinary, all visible hatches closed, nothing moving on the scarred tiles of the deck, no movement shimmering on the gleaming green bulkheads. Ahead, he could see another partition. Beyond it, he knew, the passage curved inboard and went up a half-flight of steps to reach Main Deck and access to the bridge and three escape pods there.

  Dupaynil stopped to disable the manual controls on pods six and four. Now only three pods might still be a problem: five and seven, the two most forward on the alternate passage, and pod three, accessible from the bridge and assigned to the weapons tech. Tliat one he could disable on his way to the bridge, assu
ming he could get through this next partition. Five and seven? Panis might be able to open them from outside, although the controls would not work normally.

  How long would it take him? Would he even think of it? Would the captain try to free the man in pod three? At least the odds against him had dropped. Even if they got all three out, it would still be only five to one, rather than twelve to one. With this much success came returning confidence, almost ebullience. He reminded himself that he had not won the war yet. Not even the first battle. Just a preliminary skirmish, which could all come undone if he lost the next bit.

  “I don’t care if it looks normal,” he heard on the intercom. “Try to undog those hatches and let Siris out.”

  Blast. Ollery was not entirely stupid. Panis must be looking at pod five. Siri: data tech, the specialist in computers, sensors, all that. Dupaynil worked at the forward partition, hoping Ollery would be more interested in following his Exec’s progress, would trust to the partition to hold him back. A long pause, in which his own breathing sounded ragged and loud in the empty, silent passage.

  Then: “I don’t care what it takes, open it”

  At least some of his reworking held against outside tampering. Dupaynil spared no time for smugness, as the forward partition was giving him more trouble than the one before. If he’d only had his complete kit ... But there, it gave, sliding back into its slot with almost sentient reluctance to disobey the computer. Here the passage curved and he could not get all the way to die steps. Dupaynil flattened himself along the inside bulkhead, looking at the gleaming surface across from him for any moving reflections. Lucky for him that Ollery insisted on Fleet-tike order and cleanliness. Dupaynil found it surprising. He’d always assumed that renegades would be dirty and disorderly. But the ship would have to pass Fleet inspections, whether its crew were loyal or not.