She thought she’d known every obsessed hunter of Goberling’s lode.
But she hadn’t known Roystan, who’d been able to crack Feyodor’s codes in less than a day. Anyone else would have taken weeks, if they could crack it at all. Even someone like Josune, who knew Feyodor better than most. What was she missing?
The crew started at the last record. Dates, location, ship statistics.
“Ship was full of fuel.” Roystan watched the records roll up.
“We can’t use her fuel, remember,” Pol said. “She adds synth to it.”
Synth was forbidden inside the legal zone. It could wipe out a station if it exploded. Which it did when the temperature rose above 190 Kelvin. But it tripled fuel capacity.
“She was fully fueled, fully provisioned. With empty cargo holds.”
Setting out on a long trip.
“We’ve established that, too. Tell us something new.”
Roystan glanced at the scrolling lines. “She came from Pisces III.”
Josune leaned over to look. She had, and she’d been there five days. Furthermore, the Hassim had only paid two days’ berthing fees. The bill for the excess was there in front of them.
Fighting off company people, at a guess.
Based on the smell of the bodies—she tried not to gag at the memory of her friends, her crewmates—those they’d executed in the crew room had been dead a few days. Assume the company people had boarded at Pisces III, overpowered some of the crew, and the rest had spent three days fighting them off.
Then Captain Feyodor had . . . what?
Jumped to where Josune was waiting with Roystan, who knew a lot more about Taki Feyodor than he should have.
“Go back to what happened before the company people arrived. I want to see the attack.” Josune thought she’d kept her voice normal. She ignored the sharp look Roystan sent her way.
“Later. I want to know where she’s been.” Pol stopped on a longer record and switched it to voice. They came in halfway through a low whistle, followed by a moment’s silence.
For Captain Feyodor, the longer the silence, the more impressive the feat. Josune held her breath—the longest time she’d ever had to wait—until, finally, she heard a low, admiring “All this time. You cheeky sod.” She laughed aloud, then set up a shipwide message. Her voice came through the speaker in an excited boom.
“Today, we set out on our last journey. I have the final clue I need to discover where Goberling found his transurides. Let’s get it. We’re on our way to be rich, rich, rich.”
Josune hadn’t seen Feyodor that animated in all the years she’d been on ship.
The silence in The Road’s crew room was absolute.
“Do you think she really did?” Guardian asked eventually. “Find it, I mean?”
Roystan rubbed his eyes. “She said she’d found a clue.”
She’d been coming to see Roystan. Her instructions to Josune had been explicit. “Get onto Roystan’s ship and don’t lose sight of him.”
But then, with a ship named The Road to the Goberlings, he had to be after the lost lode himself.
Roystan ate the breakfast Jacques put in front of him, while the others went back through Feyodor’s records. Important records were protected with iris and voice scans. Josune could have cleared the security for them. She didn’t offer.
“We’ll use the proceeds from the sale of the Hassim to buy supplies,” Pol said. “Then we’ll go. Find what she found.”
Roystan finished his breakfast. “I don’t recall making you captain, Pol.” He got up to get himself more coffee. “Don’t forget, we’ve deliveries to make. We have a contract.”
“Deliveries,” Pol said. “When we’ve Goberling’s information at our fingertips.”
“People spend their lives hunting for that. To date, no one has found it. We go with the job we have. We finish it. We hunt for lost worlds and rare metals in our spare time.”
While the people who’d hunted the Hassim hunted them.
If Roystan had ever hunted for Goberling’s lode—and Josune was sure he had—he’d become cynical and disillusioned. Still, he must have found something, once upon a time, for why else would Feyodor have been after him?
That was what Josune had to find out. Before he kicked her off ship.
“We have the whole of the Hassim’s records here,” Pol said. “Everywhere she went. Every world she went to. We don’t need this stupid cargo run.”
“We deliver our cargo first, Pol. It’s my commitment and my run. We don’t drop it simply because we might have a better deal. Cargo runs are hard to get, and once lost, they are lost forever.” With that, Roystan took himself and his coffee off to the bridge.
Josune followed him. She waited until they were out of earshot of the others.
“Roystan.”
He turned, almost defensive. “We’re not walking out on our cargo run, Josune.”
She hadn’t come to ask him to do that. “Brown Combine will be here in six hours. Please tell me this ship is armed.” They had blasters, but she meant cannons or other defensive weapons that could be used against another ship.
“This far inside the legal zone?”
She took that as a no. “I need to go back to the Hassim. Get some of their weapons.”
“We have shielding. The best money can buy.”
Captain Feyodor had been a believer in premium shielding, too. “It’s the only thing that stops a havoc bomb,” she’d told Josune, many times.
They kept havoc bombs on the Hassim, each one stored in its own shielded box, but Josune had never been particularly comfortable having them on board. Sure, they were keyed—and shielded—but if the bomb got loose it would drill its way down to the engine before it set off its mini nuclear explosion.
“Shielding won’t stop a determined attack.”
Roystan sipped his coffee while he studied her. “Do you know how to install a cannon?”
“Yes.” Simple, unvarnished truth.
Roystan sighed. “Why am I not surprised.” He flicked on a link. “If you can drag yourself away from plans of exploration and lost metals, Carlos, I’ve a job for you.”
* * *
• • •
Josune did one more thing before she went over to the Hassim. “Let’s put this thing into storage.” She was not leaving the Hassim’s memory out where Brown Combine could take it if they wanted to. “I’ll patch it into ship security after I’ve put the cannon in.” In case Brown came early. “But I’ll do the first part now, set it so you need three people to open the safe.” She made them all line up and put their voice and iris patterns against the strongbox. “Let’s go, Carlos.”
Carlos followed her onto the shuttle. “You really are paranoid.”
“You haven’t seen obsessed explorers in action.”
On the Hassim she went straight to the cannon she wanted. She didn’t even pretend to check the others.
“That one.” The smaller plasma cannon—two of them couldn’t carry the larger one. That took four people, and a large hydraulic lifter, which they didn’t have.
Carlos checked the model, then the secondhand prices. He whistled. “Do you know how much we could get for this?”
The trouble with Carlos was that he thought like a shareholder on a small ship, not like someone who was sitting on a potential fortune. Josune knew how much the cannon cost, for she’d been with Captain Feyodor when she had bought it.
“Better to be alive to spend the big fortune when you get it than to make a small amount of extra credits short term.” Although to Carlos, it probably wasn’t a small amount of credits. “Get me a small hydraulic lift to put this on.” They must have used the trolleys to move goods earlier; she shouldn’t have to tell him where to find one.
Josune unbolted the cannon in silence. After Carlo
s helped roll it onto the lift, she turned for the plasma.
Predictably, Carlos balked when he saw how much the plasma could be sold for. “Let’s take the cannon, a small amount of plasma, and sell the rest.”
“Plasma is hard to get this far into the legal zone, and costs three times what it’s worth farther out. We’re taking it all. A one-shot cannon is useless. Besides, we’re selling the ship in hours, so we’ll get nothing extra for it if we don’t take it now.”
Carlos put the calculator away again. “You know what scares me? Is just how good you are at this.”
“I came from the rim,” Josune reminded him. “One more item and we’re done here.”
She collected three of the small fusion bombs that could wreak such havoc. They were deceptively small, given the damage they could do. Each shielded box fit into the palm of her hand.
“What are they?”
“Bombs.” Josune didn’t expand any more. Carlos wouldn’t want them on Roystan’s ship. Roystan wouldn’t want them either. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
Provided they were locked away and only Josune could set them off.
* * *
• • •
Back on board The Road, Pol was still arguing with Roystan.
“She started just after you left,” Guardian said. “Until Roystan told her to shut up and go away. So she went off to her cabin and moaned about it with Qiang. Now they’ve gone down to talk to Roystan again. I think if he had a brig he’d lock them in it.”
Greed made monsters out of everyone. Right now, Pol was Roystan’s problem. Josune had other priorities, like making the ship safe. Although, if she got time, she might turn one of the spare cabins into a cell. Just in case.
But then, she didn’t like Pol, and she did like Roystan. What did their argument matter to her? She’d be off the ship at the next port.
She was still going to make a temporary lockup, though.
Guardian and Carlos came with her.
“Pol doesn’t know when to shut up,” Carlos said.
Josune decided to install the cannon up near the ionizer they used to clean up nearby space debris. Not close enough that if one was hit the other would be taken out, but close enough that one person could fire the cannon, and then clean up the debris with the ionizer afterward.
Carlos paced as he watched Josune prepare an airtight compartment for the cannon. “Not sure I like weapons on ship. One more hole that can fail in an emergency.”
His pacing was starting to get to her. “Why don’t you go and talk some sense into Pol.”
“Maybe I will.” Carlos turned abruptly on his heel. He stopped halfway down the passage. Turned back.
“Stay away until I’m done, Carlos.”
“But what if you—”
“You can check it then. You’re getting in my way.”
Carlos hesitated.
“Carlos, have I ever done anything to endanger the ship?”
“You’ve only been here six weeks.”
“She’s more paranoid about breaches than you, Carlos,” Guardian said. “Remember Atalante.”
Josune remembered Atalante. It still made her shudder thinking about it.
It was the station where the crew of The Road spent all that free time Pol wanted to reduce. An old structure, back when they’d shipped the central station in one piece, then added shuttle bays by bolting on conical spurs.
Unfortunately, the arrival and departure of ships placed stresses on the join where the spurs met the station. So much so that on occasion the joins failed catastrophically. Breach doors inside the station closed instantly, leaving anyone in the shuttle bay exposed to the vacuum of space.
As soon as Josune realized Roystan had a permanent berth there, she’d built a second wall between the shuttle bay and the station—inside the spur—and cobbled together an airlock out of spare parts she’d found on The Road. That left a no-man’s-land of three meters between airlock and station, but anyone inside the spur when it sheared off would have time to make it safely back to the ship.
Carlos scowled, but he disappeared in the direction of the crew room.
“I don’t envy him,” Guardian said. “Pol is being a pain. Even if she is right.”
Josune didn’t argue, but she didn’t agree with him, either. Wasn’t the captain’s word law?
Guardian watched her fit the outer casing for the cannon. “We haven’t had cannons on ship before. We work in the legal zone.”
“You haven’t had to defend a find like the Hassim before, Guardian.” It was disorienting to think of her old home as treasure, rather than as a means to find it.
Guardian watched for a while, then wandered off.
Outer casing in and airtight, Josune was ready to do the same on the outer hull. She set the markers she would use to locate the exact position when she was outside, and went to find Carlos. It was standard safety procedure to tell someone when you were going outside, and to ensure that they watched for any issues.
She was halfway to the crew room when she heard shouting. Carlos yelling at Pol? Or maybe Pol yelling at Carlos.
An odor of burned metal and plastic wafted down the passage. Josune sniffed. Someone was using a blaster. She ran.
Straight into a firefight.
Carlos was struggling to his feet. Pol had a blaster at Roystan’s head. Jacques stood nearby, hands in the air, eyes tracking the blaster.
“We’re taking the memory.”
Roystan looked over to the safe where the memory was stored. “You know where it is, Pol. You know what you did to lock it.”
Look into the iris recognition camera and say the passphrase, which they had all adapted from Feyodor’s. Each of them had chosen their own phrase.
But it took three people, and only Pol and Qiang held weapons.
Pol gestured with her free hand. “Qiang. Do yours.”
No one moved as Qiang stepped up. “I am off to find my fortune.”
“Now, hold your weapon on Roystan here.”
Josune had her sparker. She could fire on them. Especially while Pol was distracted with her own identification. She moved her hands so the sparker was easy to grab.
“No one can stop me.”
“And there you have it,” Roystan said, when they were done. “Stalemate, Pol.” There was almost a smile and a—very slight—nod of appreciation Josune’s way.
Pol smiled too and looked past Josune. “Guardian.”
And Guardian stepped up to say, “I will be rich, rich, rich.” His voice was husky.
“Guardian.” Jacques’s voice broke.
“Sorry.” It was barely audible. He didn’t meet anyone’s eyes.
“Now take it out,” Pol said.
Qiang, not Guardian, retrieved the memory stick.
Stalemate. There was nowhere for Pol and the others to go, and if Pol didn’t realize that yet, she would soon. They needed a ship, and the only ship they had was The Road.
Josune measured the odds. Carlos—looking dazed. Roystan with a blaster to his head. Jacques staring at Guardian as if it were the end of the world. He’d be no help.
Could she rely on Roystan’s reflexes? Others in the crew would have said no, but after seeing him in action on the Hassim, Josune thought they might be wrong.
She didn’t give herself time to think. She pulled the sparker out from under her jacket and fired at Qiang.
Qiang yelped and dropped the memory stick.
Pol swung around to Josune.
Roystan knocked Pol over.
She was right. He could look after himself.
Josune swung around to cover Qiang. Carlos had gone for the memory stick. He and Qiang were fighting—boots and nails. Both were bleeding. Guardian didn’t have a weapon, and even if he did, he would be less likely to fire
at her. At anyone.
Pol and Roystan scrambled for Pol’s blaster.
“Jacques,” Josune said. “Get more weapons.”
Jacques blinked at her as if she’d spoken in a foreign language.
“Do we have more blasters?”
Roystan kicked the blaster away from Pol.
Jacques finally ran across to pick up the blaster. “Nobody move.”
Qiang charged Jacques, grabbed his hand, the one holding the blaster, and aimed at his feet. She fired.
“Aargh.” Jacques let go of the blaster and clutched his foot. The burned boot dangled half off.
Josune fired the sparker. Qiang jumped back. “Why the hell did you let her on the ship with a sparker?” she demanded of Roystan.
While she’d been distracted by Qiang, Guardian had sidled over to the memory stick and picked it up. Carlos tripped Guardian. The memory stick skittered across the floor. Carlos scrambled in an ungainly crawl toward it. Pol flung herself away from Roystan and beat Carlos to it. She grabbed it up and raced for the door.
Everyone else stopped, a momentarily frozen tableau, and then Guardian and Qiang raced after Pol.
Josune ran, too. The other way. She knew where they’d go. The shuttles. Their only thought would be to get away. There was a hatch in the engine room that would cut off half the distance. Quicker, and safer.
She heard Roystan shout something after her, but she didn’t wait to hear it. He followed her.
“Josune.” But by then she was through the hatch and dropping into the shuttle bay.
Pol and the others thundered into the bay. Stopped.
Roystan dropped down behind her.
Pol raised the blaster and fired. Roystan went down.
Josune fired back. Guardian went down. Injured only.
She’d liked Guardian.
“Lifeboat,” Pol said to the others. “Quicker to launch.”
“Let them go,” Roystan said, from the floor. “We can’t keep them here.”
He was right, but that didn’t mean they should get away with it. “Sell them to a cattle ship then.” But her momentary pause had given Qiang time to drag Guardian out.
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