Curse of the Iris

by Jason Fry

  Tycho waited a moment, then dug his mediapad out of his duffel bag and entered the password for the hidden file where he’d transferred DeWise’s messages. Soon he would be rid of the Securitat agent, his schemes, and the sleepless nights that had come with them.

  I have something you want, he typed, then looked down at the glowing letters on the screen. He imagined the Securitat agent reading the message on his cruiser above Europa, or in some nest of bureaucrats on Ganymede, and allowed himself a satisfied smile.

  Tycho found the other Hashoones standing behind a hunched, bald little man in a dirty jumpsuit who was rummaging through the last of the strongboxes, humming happily to himself. Knackert was one of the more discreet members of Carina’s network of Port Town dealers who specialized in goods of uncertain pedigree.

  Knackert looked up from his work, calipers and sensors jangling from bandoliers and straps on every limb. He smiled hugely at Tycho, then dissolved into red-faced mirth. Tycho, used to the old dealer’s fits of laughter, knew enough to wait.

  “Master Tycho!” Knackert said at last, giggling as he turned a diamond-encrusted case for a personal communicator so it caught the light. “So good to see you again, ho ho! Oh, yes! And congratulations on such a remarkable prize! You’ll see these beauties again, come high season on Ganymede—and on Earth and Mars, too. Oh, yes, Master Tycho—hee hee!—your discoveries will adorn lucky wives, husbands, mistresses, consorts, and concubines for years to come. Ha! Such a pleasure to bring such marvelous objects back into circulation!”

  “An’ to pocket yer biggest commission in years, right, Knackey?” Huff rumbled amiably.

  Knackert waved that off with a chuckle and punched numbers into his mediapad. Then, with Parsons’s help, he bundled the strongboxes onto a floater cart and waddled up the ramp.

  “I’m kind of sad to see it all go,” Yana said, judging Knackert’s progress by the chortling and cackling that bounced down the well to the dinner table. “Some of that stuff was really pretty.”

  “When have you ever cared about that?” asked Carlo.

  “I’m allowed to think things are pretty,” Yana said, looking annoyed.

  Diocletia raised an eyebrow.

  “You know what I find pretty?” she asked her daughter. “Retuned engine baffles. Longer-range bow chasers. And not thinking an unsuccessful cruise will send us to the poorhouse.”

  “Longer-range bow chasers?” Yana asked, all thoughts of jewelry apparently forgotten. “Can we really get those?”

  “We can discuss it, at least,” Carina said, smiling. “There are a number of things we can discuss now. But after dinner. And after we talk about tomorrow.”

  After Parsons cleared away the dishes, Huff pulled the black stump of a cheroot out of a pouch on his bandolier and leaned back in his chair with a look of quiet satisfaction on the living half of his face. The cheroot smelled vile even before Huff lit it, but the other Hashoones didn’t bother to argue, instead scooting their chairs back to what they’d learned was more or less a safe distance.

  “Now then,” Carina said. “The Jovian Defense Force was badly embarrassed by the Ice Wolves’ grand speech at Ganymede and further rattled by the attempted raid on Europa. There will be a considerable military response, one involving JDF warships as well as privateers.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Tycho.

  “It means we’re going back to Saturn,” Mavry said.

  “Yes,” Diocletia said. “We’re getting our orders tomorrow at High Port and leaving immediately after that.”

  “The Union wants to send us off to war again?” Yana asked. “They didn’t exactly keep their promises to us after the hunt for the Hydra.”

  “Our letter of marque is a military document—we’re members of the Jovian Defense Force,” Carlo pointed out.

  “Come off it, Carlo. We’re members of the military when it’s convenient for politicians,” Yana said. “When it’s not, we’re pirates that nobody wants to talk about—and who can have our rights taken away until the next time we’re needed.”

  “You sound like an Ice Wolf all of a sudden,” Carlo said.

  “So what if I do? Maybe the Ice Wolves are right. We’re not really that different from them, if you think about it—we’re raw materials the Jovian Union makes use of but doesn’t really care about.”

  That silenced everyone for a moment. Huff puffed on his cheroot in contemplation.

  “I’m not saying I disagree with what the Jovian Union stands for, or anything like that,” Yana said. “But if our government isn’t working for the people of Saturn, why shouldn’t they be allowed to go their own way? Isn’t that what we did when we wanted our freedom from Earth?”

  “But look at how they’re doing it,” Tycho said. “Showing up with warships at High Port? Raiding Europa? That’s not the way to convince people you deserve freedom.”

  “Why does anyone have to convince someone else that they deserve freedom?” Yana asked.

  “Arrr, politics,” Huff rumbled.

  Carina held up her hands for peace.

  “The Jovian Union can’t afford to have its attention divided between threats from Earth and trouble at Saturn. So the Defense Force plans to hit the Ice Wolves fast and hard—to head off whatever they’re planning next and to show Earth that we won’t take such threats lightly.”

  “Good,” Carlo said. “We can’t appear weak at a moment like this.”

  Yana rolled her eyes.

  “So now what?” Tycho asked. “Do we vote on it?”

  “Not this time,” Diocletia said, turning to Mavry. “Your little expedition to Europa has caused our loyalty to be questioned—and it will be questioned further if we don’t join this mission. I’ve already ordered our crewers at Port Town to be ready to fly.”

  Tycho nodded. Carlo was beaming, obviously excited by the chance to fly with Jovian warships. Yana scowled, but then she nodded too.

  “Can I take you into Port Town tomorrow?” Tycho asked his mother. “I, uh, want to work on my grav-sled piloting.”

  Yana was looking at him quizzically—and so, he realized, was everybody else.

  “Now what are you up to?” Yana asked, peering at her brother. “Ah. I know what’s going on.”

  “And what’s that?” Tycho asked, hoping he didn’t look as nervous as he felt.

  “You’re still fretting about Loris Unger, aren’t you?”

  Tycho tried to look embarrassed, rather than grateful that his sister had accidentally given him the excuse he hadn’t thought of himself.

  “Fine with me,” Diocletia said. “Just be ready to go when we get back. And watch your step in Port Town.”

  “I will.”

  Yana shook her head sadly. “Tycho Hashoone, patron saint of sad old grog hounds and other lost causes.”

  DeWise agreed to meet Tycho in Port Town, naming a nondescript café near the guild hall of the Most Honorable Union of Surveyors and Metallurgists. Tycho spotted the Securitat agent at a table near the back, hands around a chipped coffee mug, and couldn’t resist grinning at the sour expression on the man’s face.

  He made DeWise wait while he got a jump-pop and a nutrient square, then sat down across from him at the dented metal table.

  “So how was Europa?” Tycho asked with his mouth full.

  “Cold.”

  “Find what you were looking for?”

  The Securitat agent sighed.

  “I think you already know what we found—nothing. We spent two weeks below the ice with one of those scanners and our own equipment for nothing. So are you going to tell me how you found it?”

  “Maybe,” Tycho said. “You first. Whose scanner did you have?”

  “Muggs Saxton’s.”

  Tycho nodded. “Which he gave you in exchange for a reduced prison sentence.”

  “That, plus access to his personal communications and everything he knew about the Iris raid and the Collective.”

  “I’m listening.”


  DeWise frowned, then shrugged. “I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore. The Collective members all trusted Josef Unger because he was that rarest of things—an honest pirate. He and your great-grandfather were the ones who hid the Iris cache when the members of the Collective were forced to scatter. Moxley got his scanner and tried to dig up the cache, but we caught him and sent him to 1172 Aeneas—where we already had Josef, Johannes, and Blink Yakata in custody.”

  “But you didn’t get Moxley’s scanner,” Tycho said.

  “No—and none of the pirates we’d already caught would cooperate,” DeWise said. “We had agents follow Johannes and Josef when they were released in 2815, but they slipped our grasp. We tried to keep an eye on the Collective members, but never got a hint that the treasure had been found—by them or anybody else. And no message came from the Bank of Ceres for eight decades.”

  “So there was no signal to follow,” Tycho said.

  “Right,” DeWise said. “We tried looking anyway, and pursued every kind of crazy theory—that the treasure was encased in the ice beneath the Unger homestead, or buried in the side of a smoker, or moving around in a robot sub. Eventually we had other priorities, and all we could do was wait. We’re good at that, when we have to be.”

  Tycho smiled. “Too bad you were looking in the wrong ocean.”

  “Don’t be a brat, Tycho. It was Callisto, wasn’t it?”

  Tycho nodded. “Right beneath Darklands.”

  DeWise considered that for a long moment, and Tycho could almost see his mind calculating. Then he cocked his head, and the corners of his lips twitched.

  “That’s very interesting,” he said in a way Tycho didn’t like at all.

  “Why is that interesting?” he asked.

  “It just is,” DeWise said. “Now, we have other matters to discuss. Do you have it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And does anybody know?”

  “No,” Tycho. “What would happen if they did?”

  “Things would be more complicated. I’ll take it now, if you please.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “What you have is dangerous, Tycho. We’re all better off if it’s in the right hands.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you. What do I have, exactly?”

  “Like I said before, information. Information that could help the Union in the current crisis.”

  “And if I don’t give it to you? What happens then?”

  “It would go badly for your family,” DeWise said, face expressionless.

  Tycho considered that.

  “I want something in return,” he said.

  DeWise smiled.

  “In addition to everything I just told you? And the fact that you weren’t jailed for piracy after your little stunt at Europa?”

  “The information was a trade,” Tycho said. “As for the rest, spare me. If we were in the brig on 1172 Aeneas, you’d have one less ship to take to Saturn.”

  DeWise’s eyes leaped around the café.

  “Be quiet,” he said. “But point taken. What is it you want?”

  “The Hydra—free and clear. No more of this nonsense in the courts.”

  “That’s not my department, Tycho. It’s out of my hands.”

  Tycho nodded. “I had a feeling you might say that.”

  He reached below the table into his jumpsuit’s hip pocket and brought out the black data disk, holding it in his hand. DeWise’s eyes leaped to it, then shifted to the carbine in Tycho’s other hand.

  “Oh, so now it’s an old-time pirate drama. What are you going to do, kid? Blow a hole in me?”

  “In you? No.”

  Tycho cocked the carbine, careful to keep it pointed away from the Securitat agent, then held the muzzle against the disk.

  “The Hydra,” he said.

  DeWise took a sip of coffee. It spilled down his chin and he wiped irritably at his face with a dirty napkin.

  “All right, Tycho. I’ll do everything I can. In recognition of your family’s services to their country during the current emergency and all that.”

  “And will that be enough?”

  DeWise sipped his coffee.

  “I can’t promise you it will be, but I would think so. Plus I won’t forget that you were helpful to us. Don’t give me a look like that’s nothing, kid. Didn’t I already bring you a prize when both you and your family needed one? Couldn’t help like that be useful to you in the future?”

  Tycho bit his lip. He had been certain that his tangled relationship with DeWise was ending, and with it the need to keep secrets from his family. Now DeWise himself was suggesting otherwise.

  But DeWise’s tip about the Portia had been a good one, and its capture had been a big help to the Hashoones. And his account of the Iris cache fitted with what Tycho and his siblings had discovered. What if he was telling the truth about the disk too? Could Tycho really deny his country an advantage now, when it was caught between enemies?

  “All right,” he said reluctantly, and handed over the disk.

  “You’ve done your country a considerable service,” DeWise said, getting to his feet.

  “I hope so,” Tycho said. “But I want to know what was interesting about the cache’s being right under Darklands.”

  “You’re out of information to trade,” DeWise said over his shoulder—but then he paused and turned back.

  “I like you, Tycho—so here’s one more freebie. It’s impressive that you found the Iris cache—we didn’t, after all. But have you asked yourself how it got there?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not completely sure,” DeWise said. “But I’ve got a pretty good guess.”

  Before Tycho could ask, DeWise shook his head. “You’ve figured out harder puzzles than this one, kid. But this time you might not like the solution.”

  16

  WHAT VESUVIA KNEW

  Now that is an impressive sight,” Carlo said.

  Ahead of the Shadow Comet, the rust-colored, oblong moon Amalthea hung in space against the seething mass of Jupiter. Arrayed around the moon was a quintet of Jovian warships and their long-range tanks. The crescent-shaped destroyers Godfrid, Ingvar, and Ingolfur were in the lead, ahead of a pair of angular, hammerheaded cruisers: the sister ships Hippolyta and Antiope.

  Off the port wing of the formation, Tycho spied a pair of privateers—Spotted Jack Almedy’s Steadfast, garishly painted with red-and-orange flames, and the graceful Izabella, captained by Garibalda Marta Andrade. Carlo maneuvered the Comet into place on the starboard wing, beside Absalom Garrett’s needle-nosed Ironhawk—the same privateer that had joined the Comet in pursuing Mox two years earlier.

  “Two cruisers, a trio of destroyers, and four privateer frigates,” Tycho said. “Can’t say we lack firepower.”

  “Arrrr,” Huff said from his usual place near the ladderwell, metal hand clamped to a rung and feet magnetized to the deck. “Ain’t the weapons what counts, but knowin’ what to do with ’em. Seen plenty of fancy flotillas come to ruin, on account of bein’ led by a fool.”

  “What makes you think Admiral Badawi is a fool?” Carlo asked.

  “Ain’t sayin’ he is. But someone will see this here big parade an’ shout the news clear to Saturn. Better to slip off from Jupiter separately and join up away from pryin’ eyes.”

  Tycho and Yana exchanged a concerned glance, but Carlo waved dismissively.

  “I’m not worried about that,” Carlo said. “I’m looking forward to showing Admiral Badawi what I can do.”

  “What we can do, you mean,” Yana said, rolling her eyes at Tycho.

  Carlo, delighted by the chance to fly alongside pilots from the Jovian military, had spent their last night at Darklands holed up in the simulation room, practicing fleet maneuvers until he wound up slumped over his console, asleep while unguided virtual Shadow Comets smashed into virtual obstacles.

  A light blinked on Tycho’s console.

&nbs
p; “Ship-to-ship communication from the Ironhawk,” he said.

  “Thank you, Tycho,” Diocletia said. “Put it onscreen.”

  The handsome, red-haired Captain Garrett appeared.

  “Diocletia,” he said, smiling broadly. “It’s been a while, but what a pleasure to fly alongside you again.”

  “Absalom,” Diocletia said politely. “Nice to fly with you again as well.”

  Mavry, out of range of Vesuvia’s camera, squashed his nose up against his face and began waggling his fingers at Garrett, tongue lolling out of one side of his mouth. Yana began to giggle. Diocletia gave her husband a venomous look.

  “This is quite the task force they’ve assembled,” Garrett said. “We’ll make Mox and his new Ice Wolf friends wish they’d never come calling.”

  Mavry put his feet up on his console and pantomimed sticking his finger down his throat. By now Yana was red-faced with half-smothered laughter.

  “Shh!” Tycho hissed at his sister.

  Mavry turned and grinned at his children, which sent Yana diving under her console, sides heaving.

  “We, um, have to check preflight, Captain Garrett,” Diocletia said. “We’ll talk to you soon. Comet out.”

  Garrett disappeared from the screen. Mavry was now pretending to be dead.

  “Honestly,” Diocletia said, pink spots on her cheeks. “Is this the quarterdeck of a privateer or a traveling circus?”

  “I think that nice young man wants to take you to the Midshipmen’s Ball,” Mavry said.

  “Maybe I’ll let him. At least he conducts himself like an officer.”

  “Mom’s right,” Carlo said, frowning. “What if a member of Admiral Badawi’s staff had seen that, Dad?”

  Mavry raised an eyebrow. “And this would happen how? Is there an ensign hiding in the larder?”

  “You know, I think I saw a guy in uniform behind the potatoes,” Tycho said, which set his sister off again.

  Carlo just shook his head and muttered something.

  “Another message,” Tycho said. “This one’s from the flagship, to all ships in the task force.”

  “Arrr, maybe they’ve hired a brass band,” Huff said.

  “Onscreen, please, Tycho,” Diocletia said. “And for the next minute, let’s see if we can impersonate an actual starship crew.”