Baen Books Free Stories 2017

by Baen Books

  The sensations were now like flames licking over half his skin. Yes, do it!

  Most of his skin, and much of his body, went numb. He could still control it, mostly, but it was like being anesthetized.

  He became aware that his face—most of his head—was wet, soaked in something sticky and thick, something very different from the foam. The foam was slowly dissolving it now, but it had been heavily distributed across his head. "What happened, Tunuvun? What did you do? How did you know to do it?"

  "I saw . . . heard . . . sensed, in some ways you humans do not . . . something happen when that red light went out. It was . . ." he paused. His voice sounded just a fraction less rough. "It was as though many of the devices and surfaces in your room were shedding, spreading a pulse of spores, perhaps. I have seen such things in the Arena, poisonous gases and such, and all of us who work with the Factions have heard of your nano-weapons, the hungry dust. I immediately tried to protect your face, prevent you from breathing before it reached you, and as I ran I generated a protective material that we have evolved to defend us against many sorts of toxic and dangerous contaminants."

  He perceived the danger and reacted so fast that he prevented me from inhaling any of it, and then evacuated ahead of the ejection and sterilization? Saul was starting to really grasp what it meant to be a Champion of the Arena. "You saved my life, Tunuvun. Thank you."

  "Someone sought to kill my host," the high-pitched, rough voice replied, still buried in the foam. "I could not tolerate such rudeness."

  Saul chuckled. "Kanzaki-Three, status?"

  "Inimical nanomaterials yielding slowly to foam. Severe damage to Tunuvun of the Genasi and Saul Maginot. Current prognosis cautiously positive. You have had a very narrow escape, Commander, but data indicates you will not succumb to this attack."

  "What I don't understand is how it happened at all. If there was inimical nanotech in my quarters the alarm should have sounded long before."

  Much more subtle than that, Elizabeth said, her light, precise voice still shaken. It was a slow restructuring infection with a trigger tied to the decoding.

  Holy Mother, Saul thought with horror. That explained what Tunuvun had described. Something had managed to cause a very subtle hidden change in top layers of elements of his apartment, which was then catalyzed to become active, lethal nanotech infectious elements when he unlocked the message. "But that would require nanotech, wouldn't it?"

  Normally. But in theory there are ways to use electromagnetic and acoustic signals to rearrange structures appropriately . . . Kanzaki-Three, immediately quarantine and examine all automated cleaning systems.

  "Already done," Kanzaki-Three replied. "Two systems non-responsive and not found within station. Backtrack analysis shows a very high likelihood that these cleaning systems self-disassembled and were converted for recycling."

  Tracks have been covered, Saul thought. But such a subtle, complex, and nigh-untraceable trap could really only have come from one source. Elizabeth, we'll need to talk to Mentor.

  Assuredly, Elizabeth said, her narrow face creased with worry and anger. One of his opposite numbers planned this. And if it was not Fairchild's doing, we need to know who was behind this, and swiftly. I will begin the process to contact him again; he will have made himself very scarce after our last contact.

  Saul stood slowly, evaluating his balance and the overall function of his body as a new flood of foam, this tinted blue, entered the sealed chamber. Ah. Medical repair nanofoam. "I presume this means we are clean of inimical nanotech?" he asked. "And are you sure this will not harm our guest?"

  "You appear free of the hostile nanotech now. The medical nanos will simply ignore Tunuvun for now; we do not quite know enough to do otherwise, at least using automated nanotech. Medical teams are on their way. We are examining maintenance and cleaning systems to prevent another such attempt."

  "Were others intended?"

  "Examination of quarters on board Kanzaki-Three showed two other such preparations. They had not been triggered and less drastic inerting procedures were needed."

  "Targets?"

  "Councilor Robert Fenelon and General Jill Esterhauer."

  All too clearly logical, Elizabeth said grimly. Both of them—along with you—have been instrumental in making and stabilizing our current attempt at a government. And despite Esterhauer's caution, both are now working well with Captain Austin.

  Saul nodded. "Good. Keep an eye out for similar approaches in future, and send the parameters to the defense and neutralization groups."

  "Already underway."

  He reached down and helped Tunuvun to stand. "Tunuvun, I don't know how to thank you."

  "You are alive. It is enough."

  Saul grinned. "I suppose it is." He extended a hand, and Tunuvun—who had obviously learned the gesture from humans in the Arena—took and gripped it. "It looks like I was wrong. Maybe I do need bodyguards."

  "You and the others," Tunuvun said. "And that, Saul Maginot . . . that is something the Genasi can provide."

  Saul laughed. "Deal, then. You keep us alive . . . and we'll teach you how to live on this side of the sky!"

  Into Gonebeyond

  Susan R. Matthews

  Morning. Port Wilmot, just off the Sagreen vector and five days from Langsarik Station, where the freight courier ship Bammers was due in six or seven of them. Brachi Stildyne—not “Security Chief Warrant Officer” Stildyne any more, not missing it—stood with his back to the wall drinking stale over-strong cavene from a disposable pressed-cellulose cup. He took in the early morning light, trying to put a name to the sensations he was experiencing.

  He was depressed. That was kind of funny, in its own way; Brachi Stildyne, depressed, just because after having turned down the offered promotion that was the career goal of any sane Security officer once “clock in for thirty and out” was discarded—First Officer, functionally second-in-command, of the Jurisdiction Fleet Ship Sceppan—in order to cleave to his old boss Andrej Koscuisko, he’d then broken ties with Andrej Koscuisko, and would never see him again. Probably never. Rumor had it that Koscuisko was in Safehaven, Nurail quadrant, but Stildyne wasn’t sure he even wanted to see Kosciusko, these days.

  As he watched the light change in the loading bay where freighter-courier Bammers was berthed he noted the cargo handler Wilmot Port Authority had sent coming down out of the ship and heading for him. Small ship, for something called a “freighter”; small enough to park on dirt, rather than in geosynchronous orbit, small enough to make escape velocity on its own power. Riggs wasn’t small. She was a tall woman, and something like in “Security shape” in her own right—tough, physical. Relatively junior, as cargo-handlers went, but she was in the right age-bracket, and ambitious.

  “A word, Chief,” she said. She had a flat-file docket in one hand, doing a little jog across the tarmac. Yes. He knew he should be in the cargo hold, helping throw crates around. They needed all the crate-throwing they could get. You couldn’t take professional Security troops off their ship and condemn them to vacation for weeks and weeks and not expect a little twitchiness to develop. And there were special circumstances with these particular troops, of course. People. Crew. They weren’t troops any more.

  But if she wanted him on shift, she didn’t say so, and he had time to finish his cavene, and it wasn’t easy to do that because Garrity had been at the brewer this morning and apparently relished the opportunity to have his cavene the way he liked it: the consistency of burnt tar, smelled that way, tasted that way.

  “Waiting,” Stildyne said, and she came up close, speaking low.

  “You’ve got termites.” No, they didn’t. Bammers was a clean ship; old, which could mean termites, but in this case it didn’t, because termite-hunting was another way to manage twitchiness. It was hard to take out fist-sized vermin whose normal diet contained so much stalloy contamination. Required determination, sometimes explosives. No, she meant something else: unauthorized personnel. “Three, I th
ink. You lot must have noticed. But I can’t tell.”

  Fifteen years, more, spent more-or-less on shipboard or in the safely enclosed spaces of military establishments; the light was always one thing or another, pre-sets, very limited degree of variation. Since he and the men who’d once been bond-involuntaries assigned to the JFS Ragnarok had come to Gonebeyond space he’d discovered a whole new world of ambient light, and it changed, it was different in the mornings than it was at mid-day and when the sun or suns went down.

  He almost remembered that, from his childhood, what there’d been of it. Sometimes he found himself looking for a controller on the nearest wall to adjust the intensity before he realized that there weren’t any controls for natural lighting.

  “We’ll be sweeping things out, once you’re happy with the loading.” No, she wouldn’t have been able to tell that the crew knew where three of Wilmot’s best sneak-thieves—and an apprentice—were hiding. They’d have passed finger-code between them. Yes, Koscuisko had pulled their governors, they could speak without being spoken to without fear of punishment. That didn’t mean any of them really knew that, yet, not on a visceral level. “Are we on schedule to clear?”

  They had the Port Authority coming in six or seven hours from now to review Riggs’ estimate of value and commodity-class of goods in hull. Then they’d pay the fees and tariffs based on Riggs’ estimate and Port Wilmot’s commerce code, and shift hull for Langsarik Station.

  “I’ll have to declare,” Riggs pointed out, neutral, professional. “Incidental passengers.”

  That was additional traffic, personnel in transit. “Understood.” She’d be coming with them to Langsarik Station, to attest to her report when Bammers got there. So Bammers could unload. Stildyne didn’t think she’d have any trouble finding a skip back to Wilmot; or maybe she’d lay over for a while, or hop a hull for somewhere else. They were adaptable people, cargo handlers.

  “If you’re done with your cavene, Chief,” she said, not quite making a point of it, because she was professionally polite and she’d clearly been able to read the relationship dynamics. He couldn’t stop them from calling him “Chief.” Six parts habit and one part stubbornness, or a subtle bond-involuntary joke, he didn’t know.

  “Coming directly, Riggs,” he said, and tried not to smile, because—although he saw his face every day and didn’t have any particular feelings about it—he’d been told it scared people. He didn’t know what to call them, since they weren’t Fleet’s property any longer. They’d been defined by their Bonds all the time he’d known them. Former bond-involuntary Security assigned, Jurisdiction Fleet Ship Ragnarok wasn’t fit to requirement, for a wide range of reasons.

  He knew what to do with “depressed.” Ignore it. There was cargo to manage. Nothing he had to be depressed about could be compared to what any of the others had in their pasts. The fist, maybe, a cadre of enforcers. It would have to be a Versanger fist, six; and an extra, that was him. They knew things about him and they hadn’t beaten him to a bloody pulp for past behavior yet. He was finding out more about them every day. That was something to distract him from “depressed.”

  If he didn’t hurry there wouldn’t be anything left for him to do, so he drank off the dregs of his cavene even knowing that he’d regret it and tossed the crumpled cup into the waste and got himself up into the cargo hold.

  ###

  Medith Riggs stood in the cargo bay at the top of the loading ramp with her back to the men at work, doing her best imitation of someone scanning her flatfile docket and thinking hard. The clearance agent from the Port Authority—Esfrans today, she thought—would be here inside of two hours. Chief had as much as told her they knew about the hiders, but they were walled in behind cargo-cartons three ranks deep by now.

  The only real clue she had that they were going to sweep up—as Chief had said—was that they’d deviated from her carefully calibrated loading sequences to the extent of facing the hidey-hold with lighter weight cargo cubes whose contents, if the tell-tales were telling the truth and she had no reason to doubt it, could be dropped from a more significant height than ship to tarmac without suffering any damage or loss of use.

  So she hadn’t pointed that deviation out to them. Her load-levels were recommendations, part of the service, best balance for fit and trim, but nobody was required to comply with her schematics, not even though they should because she knew what she was doing better than they did. She could tell. They were a fit and capable crew, but they weren’t professional cargo management handlers.

  One of them was coming up behind her, scuffing a boot-heel against the flooring to let her know he was there. Because they didn’t mean to sneak up on a person, but they moved quietly, especially for big men. “Cavene,” he said. Garrity. Blond, nice hair, nice cyborg augmentation in one eye; the kind that had cost somebody a lot of money. “Join me?”

  Happening, then. And didn’t want her to be in the way. She didn’t want to be in the way either.

  “Sure.”

  The way he made it, she only needed about as much as would cover the bottom of the cup, and water to fill. She hoped he wasn’t going to be in charge of cavene en route. Five days would be a long time to face that. He angled past her and down the ramp, very careful body language, these were all very polite people.

  She followed him. The brewer was on the inner wall of the main warehouse bay, now open, empty; she was inside the bay with Garrity between her and the outside almost before she realized he’d moved her to where he wanted her, smoothly, imperceptibly. Nothing wrong, no faint trace of a potential warning; maybe—Medith told herself—it was because she already knew what he was doing and was perfectly comfortable going along with it.

  “Ran through the base issue early today, sorry,” Garrity said. Possibly more words all together than she’d heard him say during the previous day and this one combined. “It’ll be weak. Going to have to stretch it on our way to Langsarik Station.”

  That was to cover why he was pouring hot water into the cup he’d set there on the brewer-assembly’s lip, she supposed. He was one of the broad-shouldered types, so he made one of the better sound-barriers. That Kerenko, he was a slightly more slender model. More noise would have leaked into the warehouse bay around Kerenko, although—if she was going to be fair—all of them made fairly convincing sound-buffers.

  “I’ve never been to Langsarik Station,” Medith said, in her best bright-and-conversational style, reaching for the cup. Doing her part. “Have you been there often? If you don’t mind my asking, of course. None of my business, really.”

  Garrity nodded, leaning casually against the wall between her and the outside. Looking relaxed. Swirling the cavene in his own cup, the mud in his cup, and why it needed to be swirled was a question since he drank it straight—so there was nothing to dissolve or mix. “Chief’s got someone to see, I guess. We’ve never been. Yet. But hey, recent arrivals, it hasn’t been but a few months. You?”

  This was funny. She was enjoying it. “Born and bred, actually.” Her family had been lucky. They’d gotten out of Jurisdiction space before the Bench had really started to crack down on Nurail, before the clearances, before the relocations, an entire generation before the Domitt Prison. That was why she had as much family as she did. “Raised in Ilvers. It’s a nice place. But it’s quiet. I wanted to travel.”

  She could hear vague sweeping sounds, coming in from outside. Moderately muted shouting, of the suddenly-interrupted kind. Maybe a few miscellaneous yells and crashes. Garrity grinned at her, and glanced back over his shoulder toward where Bammers stood with its cargo bay open. Suddenly she liked that. They weren’t trying to keep any secrets; they also credited her with knowing exactly what was going on.

  “Done a little more traveling than I ever wanted to, really, but that’s life for you. Now I don’t know what I’d do if I had to sit in a boat and haul net all day. Any fishing in Ilvers? Sounds like “eelvers,” doesn’t it? My old people, they still dried eels. Called
’em ‘springsnakes.’ We’d eat them every year on the year-turning, whether we wanted to, or not.”

  Nothing coming out of Bammers’ cargo bay sounded scared, from where she stood. Angry. Frustrated. Occasionally hurt, but of the quick sharp impact kind. Fist-fight. There was nothing wrong with a good brawl. She’d gotten into her share in her time, mostly in taverns, mostly of the “Didn’t you hear the lady? She said no” variety.

  She wondered how much longer the rest of his crew was going to make Garrity stand there and make conversation, because it didn’t seem to come naturally to him. “There’s a troutlike thing,” she said. “So we call it a trout. They’re pretty. And they’re good eating. Especially on the lake-shore where you caught them.” She’d never actually tasted much more than butter and salt on the fish, so she’d been happy to let her brothers and sisters eat most of the catch.

  “Cargo management,” Garrity said. That didn’t seem to follow directly, but Medith excused it. Garrity was clearly reaching for topics. “That loading diagram, thing of beauty. There are people at home who can do that in their heads, but mostly it’s just a stunt these days. Folklore competition week. It’s been a long time since people moved cargo on the old wooden hulls. Long time.”

  Long long time, Medith thought, to encourage him; but he’d stopped. They were rapidly running out of things to talk about. “Nice climate at home,” she said. “At Ilvers, I mean. Ah, a problem some years with getting enough hot days for grain crops, but the season’s pretty long, so it works out, by and large. We’ve got a nice moon, too, pretty.”

  She sounded as hopeless at conversation as he did, she thought. She wasn’t used to having to carry both ends. She never ran out of things to say to her sweetie, but that was different, and they didn’t always get much time on remote-link.

  “Two seasons. Freezing and frying. Those houses people used to put up on the slopes? They only looked like they were falling down. Maximum ventilation.” But someone called to them from outside, and he straightened up with visible relief.