Jumper's Hope: Central Galactic Concordance Book 4

by Carol Van Natta

  Once on board, Jess had unsurprisingly cracked the Faraón’s main shipcomp within an hour, and soon thereafter, owned every other onboard comp, code, and data hypercube. Once he controlled the ship’s communication systems, he sent her instructions on how to use the stolen, wiped, and customized percomp he’d given her to send private messages to him that wouldn’t be recorded or traceable.

  More surprising was Jess’s ability to convince the crew he was a sociable, mercurial gambler with a colorful past and the attention span of a hummingbird. He was already on a first-name basis with everyone, even the grumpy logistics officer, and his memorable antics gave the crew something to gossip about and drew attention away from her. Once she’d figured out what he was doing, she made every effort to be as unremarkable as possible.

  When “Cadroy” pinged a quick message to “Laraunte” that he was going to use the room, she waited ten minutes, then sent Jess a private message.

  K: Captain ordered fast packet drops from here on out. Navigator Bhatta says you’ve been intensely busy. What are you working on?

  So she’d look legitimately occupied, she called up a chart for the star system that had Winnogralix Proxima, their next planetary port of call, where they’d take on more cargo at its space station.

  J: Packets of code seeds to strengthen our IDs and collect data. I’ll explain sometime. Made more IDs, just in case. They’ll go out at each stop. What does Bhatta think I’m doing?

  K: I told her I suspected another new gambling system.

  J: Good. Hoping for query results on the janitor. Not holding my breath.

  All they had from Neirra Varemba was the name “Tuzan the Janitor.” Old, rotten Ridderth had twenty million residents, and that didn’t count the military bases or the transient body-shop customers. People who wanted to get lost could usually stay that way. Jess’s long-distance data queries to Mabingion’s planetary net were a shot in the dark.

  He knew about her skirmish with the mercs and how she’d met Neirra. When Kerzanna had awakened after whatever the healer had done to her, Neirra had again apologized for her methods, repeated the strongly worded request to find Tuzan, and told her the reunion would start soon. Neirra had insisted that Kerzanna wait for Jess, even if it meant giving up the expensive passenger liner berth. Neirra had also claimed Jess was another of her “children,” whatever that meant.

  Although Neirra had healed Kerzanna’s other injuries, and maybe even repaired the interface between her “aftermarket” ramp-up and her cybernetic systems, it was highly unlikely that Neirra healed the waster’s disease. The CPS hadn’t yet solved the problem with platoons of minder healers and seventy years of research. On the other hand, even under the constant assault of the horrifically cruel leash on her back, Neirra had formidable talents. Kerzanna had been treated by top Jumper Corps healers during her years of service, and Neirra’s deft skills rivaled the best of them.

  J: Can I ask a question?

  It was his way of bringing up a delicate issue. They’d had no time to talk about personal matters in the mad scramble to get off Branimir under the noses of the vigilant and irritated orange-uniformed mercs, and zero face-to-face privacy since boarding the Faraón, since they supposedly disliked one another. She appreciated the effort he was making to communicate, so if he found it easier to handle using only words through a percomp, she’d take it. If she was honest, it was easier for her, too. She was far too aware of him as the tall, sexy, handsome man she’d once loved, and her hormones and remembered feelings got in the way of rational thinking. The powerful intimacy of sex would make it too easy to fall back into old, bad patterns.

  She glanced casually around the nav pod. Captain Tanniffer was out in the passenger dining hall for dinner, and Chief Drive Engineer Yarsulic rarely ventured out of the engine pod if he could help it, so that left only the pilot in the nav pod. Malámselah’s distracted expression said he was jacked into multiple ship systems, as usual. She didn’t blame him. It was more interesting than playing “count the stars,” and much more ethical than using the ship’s emergency comm system as a private entertainment channel, as some pilots did. Speaking for herself, she’d rather tag the precise coordinates of an entire nebula’s worth of the space objects than listen to people complain about politics, the food, or each other. And she’d much rather have sex with someone than listen to others having all the fun.

  K: Sure, go ahead.

  J: How do you feel?

  She knew he meant her waster’s disease, not the massive headache she’d still had when boarding. Jess was more susceptible to the hope that Neirra’s extraordinary claim was true, but then again, he could afford to be. He wasn’t the one dying.

  K: No better, but no worse. No more twitchy after-effects from the autodoc, thank the gods of chaos. Has your medic noticed anything different?

  J: No. We need a PTVS test meter and the baseline percentages from your medical records.

  “Kane.”

  Kerzanna turned to face the pilot. “Orders?”

  Malámselah grinned at her. “Sure you’re not military?”

  Damn, but that automatic response was a hard habit to break. “No, sir. Just worked with a lot of pilots who were.” Kerzanna gave a slightly embarrassed shrug. “Combat makes me queasy.”

  “Ping me if something drastic happens.” He tapped his earwire. His order was a formality, since Laraunte Kane wasn’t a pilot. He was still jacked in and would know about any problems a lot sooner than she would. “I need to go drain the lizard.”

  She assumed that meant urinate. He seemed to delight in collecting colorful metaphors in various languages and peppering his conversation with them whenever he got the chance. “Yes, sir.”

  He strode out the door toward the freshers. Luckily, none of the nav pod staff were military, much less ex-Jumpers, or she’d have probably given herself away the first day.

  Now that she was alone in the nav pod, she made herself write Jess one of the questions she’d been avoiding, because it brought her hard up against the false memory of his death. She knew it was false, but it still packed one hell of an emotional punch.

  K: On our last day in Ridderth, what did you do after you left?

  Rather than obsess about Jess’s possible answer, she opened a copy of Bhatta’s navigation solution for the in-and-out bounce for the packet drop. The transition from transit to realspace was always tricky. The Central Galactic Concordance government maintained and updated current maps of all comm buoy locations, but speedy re-entry impaired a ship’s ability to avoid new or transient obstacles. On the other hand, it also made the ship a less inviting target for any lurking interstellar thieves, such as jackers or pirate clan, looking for an easy slice-and-haul.

  She spot-checked a few of Bhatta’s calculations and verified the solution used the most current realspace data, all confirming the plot was solid. Which, according to her internal chrono, left seven hours to kill for this shift before the drop. Dutiful Laraunte Kane had already read two years of logs and the ops manual for the nav system. Her navcomp was blocked from reading the newstrends or playing games, and she couldn’t go poking around the pilot logs or engine specs without drawing undue attention. Maybe she’d ask Jess for stealthy access.

  Needing to curb her impatience, she began sketching in a packet-drop solution that assumed a couple of jackers were waiting for them at the packet drop. The star charts said the comm buoy was in the middle of a small void, with no convenient places to hide, so the jackers would have to play dead in the dark until the unsuspecting victim exited transit, wait until after their victim’s routine scans and the first packet pull, then power up and pounce.

  Kerzanna first added spin to the exit, which would cause the ship to emerge into realspace at an unexpected angle. In case the new vector happened to put them in the jaws of the two-prong trap, she added a pre-calculated two-step, stop-and-turn vector change option. It would save the Faraón’s flux for…

  A ping from Jess interrupted
her.

  J: After I left our flat, I stole a case of percomps and put our names on them, then gave them to some Canals kids and told them to scatter. Took a shuttle to the space station, but got caught by a biometric scanner. Nearly got detained and restrained, but Dixon Davidro intervened and kept me safely iced until the police contained most of the riots. He asked me about missing data hypercubes for Minder Veterans Advocates and had Neirra Varemba show me the holos of CPS people killed in the riots to see if I recognized any of them. Your holos were the last. My Nordic friend kept me functional until I could get away from Davidro and company. I bought farming property on Branimir and moved there after the CPS released me from the observation period.

  The dry facts didn’t tell her what he’d been thinking or feeling, but she’d seen how even talking about the holos of her supposed death had jolted him. She still didn’t like the cynical, paranoid part of Jess, but she was glad it had been there to save him.

  K: Why did Davidro protect you?

  She’d never met the man who had been Jess’s supervisor for the final years of his Kameleon Corps service. She’d heard enough about him through Jess to make her think Davidro was ambitious and considered Jess and the other Kams he handled to be tedious obligations at best.

  J: Guessing, but he tanked at following safety procedures when I was active, hence my “friends.” My detainment or death would have triggered a detailed review of my service records, and caused him trouble. He had a new special project that he thought would flux his career.

  She was deeply curious about what an active Kameleon did, but it wasn’t as important as figuring out who was chasing them now. Chasing her, with Jess as collateral damage. She didn’t know the new, more confident Jess, but she respected the hell out of him for finding a way to make use of the “friends” in his head. She still felt guilty about unwittingly dragging him into her problems, but he’d willingly helped her without hesitation. Which made her feel guilty for having left him behind in the Branimir spaceport to lead the trouble away from him, though she thought he’d have done something similar if he’d suspected he was endangering her. Which brought up another question.

  K: Any new ideas on why Neirra went to all that trouble for our reunion?

  In their working theory, Neirra had sent the CPS message to get Jess to the meeting at Markalan Crossing, and tampered with Kerzanna’s calendar to insert the fake meeting. Kerzanna had never met Neirra, but Jess had interacted with her dozens of times during his service years. He said she’d been quiet and distant.

  J: No. I still think it’s what she told you, righting a wrong, but no clue what. Maybe Tuzan will know?

  Kerzanna heard Malámselah’s voice coming from the corridor.

  K: Company’s coming. Later.

  She signed off the private channel and brought up the navigation solution she’d been creating.

  Malámselah wandered over to her. “That the packet-drop solution?”

  Kerzanna shook her head. “No, sir, Bhatta already plotted and queued that.” She hunched her shoulders and tried to sound diffident. “I’m just fooling around.”

  “Show me.” Evidently Malámselah was bored, too.

  She made the navcomp display the holo, then play the visual simulation. He had her play it again.

  “That’s pretty clever. Going for a higher cert?”

  She shook her head. “No, sir, I won’t have the cumulative hours for a few years yet.” She hoped that was true, because she hadn’t memorized that data. She’d never make a very good spy.

  “Your solution is good against jackers. They think superior ships always win. If I was pirate clan, though, I’d have a gunship or two about right here”—Malámselah pointed his finger in a location in the holo map—“in case the welcoming committee missed.” He gave her a challenging smile. “Come up with a way around that, and I’ll play lion pride to your gazelle.”

  Besides giving her something productive to do, working on her solution also gave her a good excuse to ask for access to the ship and engine specs. She’d feel better knowing what the ship could handle, even if she couldn’t be the pilot.

  “I’ll do my best, sir.” She appreciated Malámselah’s impulse to mentor and encourage Laraunte Kane’s interest. She’d have to make sure the initial solution was suitably conventional, maybe even timid, and let him improve it.

  CHAPTER 11

  * Interstellar: “Faraón Azul” Ship Day 05 * GDAT: 3242.008 *

  JESS GAZED UP at the unfamiliar simulated stars in the sky as seen during summer from Cadroy Joffalk’s supposed hometown on the planet Osapan. The Faraón’s advertised “observation deck” was a small, re-purposed storage room near the engine pod. It was hard to find and offered no other multimedia features, which probably explained why the other passengers avoided it. He’d found it the second day and made it his refuge when the bleedover headaches flared. He liked the darkness and whisper-quiet thrumming of the flux drive that the engineer part of him wanted to get a look at, and the chance to sprawl his long limbs wide on the deeply padded floor instead of hanging over the edges of the fold-down sleeping platform in the crew quarters he shared with his “cousin.” One of the ship’s cats, a long-bodied, yellow-striped creature with broad shoulders and a raspy voice, liked the room, too, or maybe just the warmth of Jess’s chest. He’d never been around enough cats to know.

  The incoming comm packets they’d picked up at their stop at Winnogralix Proxima brought troubling news. His code snippets gleaned all incoming data for subjects of interest, in case he needed to do damage control. He’d toyed with waiting to tell Kerzanna until she was off duty, but he was trying to be better about not hoarding information. He subvocalized a text message to ping to her, knowing the code he’d inserted into the shipcomp’s communications module gave it immediate amnesia regarding any private conversations between him and Kerzanna. In recompense, he was untangling the snarly mess several previous, woefully incompetent comms techs had left. Once he relinquished control, the Faraón’s comm system would work faster than it had in years.

  J: Packet has two pieces of bad news. Now, or later?

  She responded almost immediately, meaning she was probably alone in the nav pod at the moment. The jump to transit from the Win-Prox system must have gone smoothly, or he and the passengers would have noticed. He hadn’t traveled enough to feel the subtle transition from realspace to faster-than-light transit space the way Kerzanna and the crew could.

  K: Now, please. Wondering is worse than knowing.

  J: My neighbor says the flitter port hangar building burned to the ground, with your sabotaged flitter wreckage inside. Neirra Varemba died from a fire on her ship, with heat intense enough to reduce the interior to biomass char. They only found her yesterday.

  This response was slower in coming.

  K: Frelling hell.

  He wished he had comfort for her, or new ideas, but he’d already told her he thought she’d seen something or knew something that she didn’t recognize as important. Jess-the-bomber grumbled that she might be lying about not knowing, but couldn’t explain how that fit with her trying to leave him at the spaceport. Kerzanna’s inclination to look out for others, even strangers, went bone deep. She’d gone to the trouble of releasing her business’s contract pilots for a couple of weeks while she was “dealing with personal issues,” and giving up scheduled runs to competitors so her customers wouldn’t be inconvenienced. For people she cared about, she’d do a lot more.

  J: Only you and I know the two events aren’t random. Constables won’t unless we tell them.

  He knew he didn’t have to tell her it would be a bad idea to involve law enforcement until they had more facts.

  K: Someone likes fire.

  J: Agreed. When is the next packet drop?

  K: In 10.2 hours. Pilot Malámselah plans to surprise Kane by using her spin-exit nav solution. He likes teaching. After that, Felterholdt for cargo and flux, in 2.7 days. Bhatta invited Kane to a joyhouse there s
he knows. Loriray Mejo in 6.1 days. Mabingion in 8.2 days. Comm drops every two ship days, but might skip some if running late.

  Jess’s mouth quirked in amusement. Kerzanna couldn’t help but make friends, even when she was supposed to be in hiding. Flamboyant, flighty Cadroy Joffalk amused the crew and provided warmth to cats, but they’d remember Laraunte Kane long after Cadroy was forgotten.

  J: We’ll have new IDs on Mabingion.

  K: Okay.

  Jess wished she was there in the room with him, so he could maybe tell if she agreed with his caution or thought he was being paranoid. That was just an excuse, though. He missed her. He’d only realized it once they’d boarded the Faraón and couldn’t talk to her, much less feel the warmth of her presence or see how she was holding up. Just one day of being with her again had already changed his life, just like it had when he’d first met her five years ago.

  K: Ridderth will be different.

  J: Yes.

  He both anticipated and dreaded what they’d find in the city that held so many memories. Once they delivered the packet in her mind with the key from his, would she want to leave him again? Could he survive losing her again if she did? And that didn’t even take her deteriorating health into account. Even if she stayed, they might only have a few more years together, if Neirra’s miracle cure didn’t pan out. The cat on his chest meowed quietly. He rubbed behind the cat’s ear, which it seemed to like.

  K: What can you tell me about Kams?

  He’d been expecting the question a lot sooner, but considering how fractured he’d been four years ago, maybe she’d been afraid to ask. Even now, her phrasing gave him latitude to provide safe answers. He’d like to tell her he’d gotten better, though he wasn’t sure that was true.

  J: Newstrend version, or in depth?

  K: I have five hours till dinner and ten hours until the next drop. Malámselah wants Kane to study an introductory transit physics text and an ancient, pre-flight Japanese text on the art of war. What do you think?