by Chris Bunch
LITHIA: Of course, dummer. But how?
KEL: Take the old hide for everything.
ERIN: Stupido! That’s a good way of killing the goose!
Chorus of agreement.
JO: No. We won’t take advantage of Rosewater-Jones. At least until we figure out how things shake. Porcellis is a pleasure world. So they’ll have gambling.
ERIN (Impatient): Of course. But that’s not big enough to make all of us rich rich. And we’re too young now to get away with much.
VON: Boys. They’ll pay.
LITHIA: For what? Having us take our clothes off, like my cousin always wants me to do?
ARBRA: Eeeech! He’s the one with all the pimples, right? He wanted me to show him the stables, right before last hols. Offered me five credits if I did. I told him to get kicked by a mule.
LITHIA: But you thought about it, didn’t you?
ARBRA (Giggles): Of course. Wouldn’t you … if he weren’t so heinie-ugly?
LITHIA: Maybe. If it’d been fifty credits.
MEGAN: Eeech! Sex! And how much you want to bet that any boy on Porcellis that would pay to do dirty things to you would have pimples? (Primly) I’ll bet any boy who’s good-looking doesn’t have to pay for it. Or else he’ll want you to do all kinds of weird things that’ll hurt and everything. And I don’t want to think about some dirty, hairy, drooling old man.
ERIN: Megan’s right. That idea doesn’t go anywhere. Doing what boys want is liable to get you all kinds of ugly rots. My aunt told me.
LIS: I read that the only people who make any real money out of things like that are the ones who have girls working for them. And we’re not old enough to get anybody to do that yet.
VON: And I don’t want to work for anybody, ever.
More agreement.
MEGAN: Stealing. That’s it. Jewels and things like that. And you know a richie like old lady Rosewater’ll have rich friends with all kinds of goodies.
ERIN: But you have to have a fence after you steal them, so that’s out until we know more about Porcellis.
KEL: Drugs. The holos say there’s lots of credits in that.
VON: And guns. And bodies. And lots and lots of jail time if you get caught. No.
LIS: What about doing what these Star Risk people do? They don’t seem to work very hard. And they get to carry all kinds of sharpy things like guns, and get to fly real fast without worrying about cops. And they’re not bad. For old farts.
ERIN: But you got to have training to do what they do. Like experience in some kind of army, and I for one don’t want to join anybody’s army and get ordered around and eat shitty food and get told what to do by people who need to wear a patch to remind them of what their names are. That’s ugly ugly. What we need to do is come up with some kind of new sin.
Mutters of agreement … various voices saying they don’t have any ideas, then silence.
ERIN: Well, we’ve all got something to think about, anyway.
Jasmine turned off the recorder.
“Then they all started talking about who their favorite singer is, which I didn’t figure any of you cared about.”
Sims and the Star Risk operatives stared at each other.
Finally, M’chel said, “Old farts, hmm?”
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
That “evening,” the girls tried something new. After their seating for the third meal, they grouped in Erin’s cabin, changed into their best, and set out, en masse and with speed, out of their passage into the recreation areas. Erin had called this a “bomb burst” tactic, figuring that Star Risk couldn’t corral all of them, and at least a few would find something profitable to do.
She still wasn’t aware of the bug in her suite.
The girls roared down the corridor and encountered Star Risk, Alice Sims, and a dozen stewards.
Shortly thereafter — in spite of struggles, storms, and wails — they were returned to their suites, and the doors locked — which should, Jasmine said, have been done on takeoff and left barred until they reached Porcellis.
Alice Sims was miserable.
Chas Goodnight offered her a drink and some comforting.
“I’ll never make a good teacher,” she groaned, knocking back her glass of guaranteed-from-France-on-Earth champagne.
“Probably not,” Goodnight agreed, refilling her glass. “But you might do fine as a prison guard.”
Sims drained that glass as well.
One thing led to another, and she found herself kissing him.
An hour later, she surveyed the bedroom of his suite, littered with their clothes.
“I have an excuse,” she said. “It’s been a long time for me.”
“I don’t bother to look for one,” Goodnight said smugly, reaching for her.
It was morning, ship’s time, when, looking rumpled but happy, Sims let herself out of Goodnight’s suite and crept down the corridor toward her own cabin.
She heard a girlish giggle from behind her and whirled, not in time to see which door closed.
“This,” she murmured, “isn’t going to make my job much easier.”
But, somehow, she didn’t give much of a damn.
• • •
Two days after Goodnight and Sims’s tryst, alarm bells shrilled.
“All passengers, all passengers, report to your cabins at once, and prepare for emergency procedures and moving to your lifeboat stations. All crewmen, to your emergency stations.
“Stand by for further orders.
“All deck officers go immediately to assigned secondary command posts.
“This is not a drill.”
FIVE
M’chel Riss was never that happy in any situation without an escape hatch, and that exactly fit the Imperial Victory. She never believed that any civilian ship as big as the Victory could conceivably have enough lifecraft, nor would they be within her reach in the event of a catastrophe.
So she always tried to make friends with the crew, in the vague thought that if disaster struck, she’d at least have somebody to talk to before the smashup.
Riss buttonholed one of the ship’s officers and asked her what the hell was going on.
The woman leaned close, and said that they’d had a com — she didn’t know from where or from whom — that there was a bomb aboard.
Since the woman looked rattled, M’chel put on a calm face, and said, “Probably just a hoax from some sick fool.”
The officer looked slightly calmer as she bustled away.
M’chel wondered how many times she’d given some placid reassurance in her career shortly before the doors blew off. She set that thought aside and made for the other Star Risk operatives to give them the word.
Then she planned on a long, satisfying meal on her fingernails.
But no bangs banged, and the Victory popped out of hyperspace and made for the Alliance world of Cygnes IV.
Babbling comfort, it set down at a remote spaceport. Military and police swarmed aboard, and the passengers were shuttled to IV’s capital. Every hotel and pension was filled to the brim while the Victory was toothcombed for explosives and such.
Von Baldur contacted St. Searles and told them why they were delayed, gave Rosewater-Jones’s representative on Porcellis the same message, and found an exclusive girls’ school to put his charges in for the estimated week that the Victory would be dry-docked for the search.
On the third day after their arrival, a pair of patrol craft — or so the media reported — made a quote daring raid end quote on the drydock, and scattered incendiaries along the length of the ship’s hull.
The Victory burned merrily, and every emergency team on the planet swarmed the shipyard, worried that the ship’s power plant would go up.
Von Baldur had other worries.
“The question I have,” he told the other Star Risk people, “is whether or not I should allow myself to be paranoid and think this whole mess has anything to do with us.
“First a b
omb scare — that is what I am calling it, since the last report said that no explosives had been found aboard the Victory, and no further communiqués had been received from the bombers. Then a successful firebombing while the ship lies helpless.
“So the first question to worry about is this: What do our charming innocents have control of or access to that can justify the total destruction of a multibillion-credit ship?”
“That’s one good worry,” Riss agreed. “A second, incidental, one might be what the girls are now up to.”
“Uh-oh,” von Baldur said.
M’chel gestured for Grok to explain.
“I was making a routine check of the rooms our clients are occupying, just to ensure there was no mischief at hand,” the alien said, “and I found a nice, compact little laboratory in Lis’s closet.”
“Making what?” Jasmine asked.
“That took a bit of analysis,” Grok said. “It turned out to be a substance from Earth’s dark ages. Something called lysergic acid diethylmide, a derivative from the fungoid known as ergot.
“It basically instills in the taker a psychotic state, resembling what humans knew as schizophrenia.
“It was very popular at one time, taken recreationally before listening to rather primitively structured music.”
“People got messed up on it for fun?” Jasmine asked.
“They did,” Grok said. “Which is why Lis was making it — for sale to the older students. It was becoming the newest fad when I intervened.”
“Oh, brother,” Goodnight said. “So next we’ll be accused of turning a bunch of children into drug addicts.”
“Possibly,” Grok agreed. “But if so, that eventuality has already occurred, and is not worth concerning ourselves with.
“I confiscated the chemical gear and destroyed the portion Lis had already formulated.”
Grok was silent for a moment.
“Except, I shall confess, for a single dose that I calculated to be correct for my body mass.”
“You took this swill?” M’chel asked, incredulous.
“I did,” Grok said. “And found it a quite pleasant experience. It provided great insights into various metaphysical matters that I have been pondering. Besides Earth’s grappa, it was one of the most enjoyable substances I’ve ever ingested.”
“Wonderful,” Riss said sarcastically. “Not only do we have a murderous alien as a partner, but one that’s now an addict as well.”
“This has nothing to do with my theory that all this may be aimed at us,” von Baldur said, a trifle impatiently.
“Not enough hard data to operate from,” Jasmine said. “At present, no more than an interesting conjecture at best.”
“I did not think it worthy of more than mention,” Friedrich said. “So I suppose we just sit here until Cunard sends a replacement for the Victory.”
“Hopefully,” Riss said, “we’ll be allowed to do just that.”
They weren’t.
It was quite a professional kidnap attempt.
They came in just before dawn, evidently planning to take off with their prey and bury themselves in morning commuter traffic on the nearby throughway.
There were four lifters. Two were medium capacity, two were heavy-duty. One heavy-duty antigravity lifter orbited the school, the other three made straight-in approaches and slammed in on the school’s flat roof.
Fourteen men and women armed with gas guns and blasters, wearing dark body armor, dashed out. Eight of them carried what could only be called kidnap kits — restraints, gags, blindfolds, sedatives.
The roof appeared free of any security precautions.
There’d been none when Star Risk arrived.
All there’d been time enough for was for Grok to jerry-rig a proximity braking unit from one of their own rental lifters to use as a warning radar, which yammered out a warning instead of hitting the braking unit.
The raiders blew the door to the roof open, and then were stopped. The stairwell had been thoroughly blocked with old desks and furniture.
They milled about indecisively for a moment, giving Star Risk time to yank on clothes and combat harnesses.
Jasmine thought, later, that it was as if their plan had gone only so far, and now they were improvising.
The attackers grabbed furniture and threw it out of the stairwell, clearing the way.
By that time, Grok had smashed a window in his room two floors below, and was eeling up the side of the building, using the ever so ornate and sturdy red ivy as a climbing rope, Riss and Goodnight after him.
The stairwell came clear, and the first pair of raiders started down it.
Jasmine King and Friedrich von Baldur were waiting, and blasters thundered, the bolts ricocheting up the passageway into soft targets.
The raiders flinched back, straight into fire from the three who’d reached the roof.
They might have been well prepared up to a point, but they weren’t ready for a combat assault.
Rounds from their blasters were going high, wide, and handsome.
Riss and Goodnight pulled themselves onto the rooftop, and were in prone firing positions. Grok held on to the ivy with one enormous paw and started shooting promiscuously into the raiders’ midst.
Someone shouted, “Extract!” and three or four of the raiders ran for the largest, rearmost lifter.
The engines had been left running on the lifters, and the pilots were gunning their engines, eager to pull out.
The rear lifter, not full, came off the ground just as two more raiders grabbed for the still-open ports.
The pilot of that lifter pushed at them, trying to get them to let go while he tried to clear the lifter in front of him.
Distracted, he didn’t use enough power, and the bigger lifter tore into the top of the small one in front.
The pilot lost control, and the heavy lifter cartwheeled and spun.
Grok carefully put half a magazine of bolts into the control compartment of that lifter, and it twisted down, crashing and exploding in the school grounds.
The lifter it had smashed into also tried to get away, and Riss sprayed a burst into the engine compartment.
Its engine died, and it crashed back down on the rooftop, rolling onto its side.
Riss killed the pilot as he tried to jump out, then ran to the lead lifter and chattered the rest of her magazine around its interior.
She crouched against it for cover as the few remaining raiders ran from Goodnight’s deadly blaster fire toward her.
One of them might have been lifting his arms to surrender, but was a little too slow and died with his fellows.
The rooftop was smoke hung, and Riss heard, over the ringing in her ears, the screams of the students in the floors below.
Goodnight put a bolt into one raider who was still moving and trotted to Riss.
The fourth watchdog lifter recognized the predicament he was in, broke out of his orbit, and put on full power away from the school.
Riss braced, took careful aim, and realized her blaster was dry.
She changed magazines and retook her stance as the sole surviving lifter went low, just above the trees, and was gone.
“You all right?” Goodnight said.
She nodded.
Chas looked around and saw that Grok was uninjured, as Jasmine and Friedrich burst onto the rooftop.
He considered the bodies and the girls now cautiously peering up from windows, the wisping smoke, the blaster holes everywhere.
“Well, enough of this shit,” he snarled.
SIX
Chas Goodnight went ship hunting as soon as the schoolgirls had been relocated to a luxurious but defensible hotel, and a dozen armed security types had been laid on.
With him went Friedrich von Baldur. This was one of Freddie’s favorite side benefits of being a mercenary — being able to shop for exotic toys with someone else’s money.
He still recalled most fondly a brief interval when he’d had his own battleship, until
one of Star Risk’s accountants took a look at the wallowing warship’s operating costs and rather sternly told him that he could either dump the barge or rapidly find a client with a good-sized fleet willing to let him play admiral.
Von Baldur couldn’t, and so the battleship vanished into the mists of history.
At the third shipyard they got lucky, finding a recently built research vessel, intended, von Baldur thought, for small expeditions that’d cover its real use as a yacht that was quite operable by a crew of three.
It wouldn’t be economical to operate, but it was sleek and very, very fast, its engine spaces fully automated. And besides, von Baldur told Goodnight reasonably, the fuel costs would be the clients’ problem. “And no doubt dear, sweet Mrs. Rosewater-Jones can field the ticket, especially since she owns a gambling world.”
“True,” Goodnight said. “All she has to do is kick the vig up a point, and she’ll never ever notice the pain.”
One of the biggest virtues of the ship was having crew quarters very separate from those of the “research fellows.”
“We can stuff the kids in the suites,” Goodnight said, “and not have to worry about what they’re plotting.”
Friedrich pouted a bit about not being able to occupy the owner’s suite, but subsided when Chas glowered at him.
Better yet, from Star Risk’s perspective, the partnership that owned the good ship Monkey Business was more than willing to turn it loose on a short-term lease rather than sell it outright, particularly when Goodnight had no objections to an all-inclusive insurance policy.
“I’m betting they can’t dump a fuel hog like the Business with a gun at somebody’s head, and are hoping like hell that we’re going to do something nice and high-risk with it,” Goodnight guessed. “Which, of course, we are, since I’m assuming the bastards would like to have another try at us.”
Von Baldur wasn’t paying any attention. He was trying to figure how he would convince the others that the captain’s quarters should rightfully be his.
• • •
M’chel Riss, on the other hand, had been brooding.
After a while, her dark thoughts were so productive she roped in Jasmine King, who, in turn, involved Grok in the project.