Ballistic

by Marko Kloos

  “You know, they used to have tourist flights for zero g,” Tristan said when Aden muttered a curse after banging his shin on the edge of the mess deck table while trying to stick a graceful landing.

  “They did?” Aden gave Tristan a skeptical look and strapped the seat’s lap belt around his waist.

  “Back when spaceflight was new again, right before the colonization wave. People would pay good money to go up into orbit around Gretia and experience an hour or two of floating around.”

  “That idea sounds dumb enough to be plausible,” Aden said.

  “I’m not even kidding. People shelling out tens of thousands for a little bit of constant free fall. And now you have to have money to avoid zero g. Cheaper to get passage on a freighter without a gravmag array.”

  “I guess everyone figured out that being weightless is only fun for those first two hours. Until they have to eat and drink. Or empty their bladders.”

  “Gravmag changed everything,” Tristan said. “Cut the transit times between the planets by fifty, seventy, ninety percent. Before, they all had to chug along at one g almost all the time. And then, boom. Want to make a three-day run at seven g? Crank up that fusion drive. Talk about supercharging system commerce.”

  Tristan held out a squeeze bottle.

  “Here, give this a try.”

  Aden eyed the bottle for a moment before taking it from Tristan.

  “Is that going to have me bouncing off the walls in here?”

  “No, it’s pepper sauce. I mixed it before we went to stealth. Used some of the stuff I bought on Pallas One. Don’t worry. It’s a lot tamer than Spacers’ Sunrise.”

  Aden took the cap off the spout and squeezed a very small quantity of the sauce into his mouth. In zero g, even eating and drinking felt unnatural. Without the assist from gravity, food and liquids didn’t stay on the tongue or go down the esophagus easily.

  “It’s good,” he said. “Really good. Bit of a kick, but just a small one.” Something about the taste reminded him of the vegetable fields at his family’s estate, the way they smelled in the autumn sun when the produce was ripe. “Tastes like liquid sunshine.”

  “That’s what I’ll call it,” Tristan said with a smile. “Liquid Sunshine. I think it’ll go well with the soy base in the galley meals.”

  “That better not be alcohol,” Tess said from the doorway as she floated through it. “You know we’re not supposed to drink on stealth runs.”

  “It’s hot sauce,” Aden said. “Tristan mixed it. To improve the freeze-dried dinners.”

  “Some of those are beyond salvation, I fear.” Tess reached the table and grabbed the zero-g handle that was protruding from the surface on one end. She flipped herself around and took a seat, far more gracefully than Aden had managed.

  “That awful oversalted veggie layer thing in particular,” she continued. “The number-eleven meal. I could swear it’s fifty percent sodium. I don’t think anyone likes that one. I don’t know why we keep buying it.”

  “It’s a package deal from the distributor. Major price break if you buy unbroken variety boxes,” Tristan said.

  Tess was wearing the sleeves of her flight suit tied around her waist again. Her orange undershirt had a faded Tanaka Spaceworks logo on it. Aden had noticed that most spacers either wore their hair short, or long enough to be tied back in a zero-g environment. Tess had gone the second route. Her black hair was mostly gathered in a tail, but a few unruly strands had come loose. She blew one out of her face, and it drifted away from her eyes in slow motion. The Aden from ten years ago wouldn’t have thought of her as his type. Now he didn’t even know if he still had a type, but he found himself attracted to her low-key competence. Tess was quietly good at many things. She knew the ship inside and out, and she was the best nuts-and-bolts engineer he had ever worked with, both in her understanding of systems and her hands-on skills with wrench and welder. She played a string instrument Aden didn’t recognize—their berthing compartments were adjacent, and sometimes he could hear the soft plucking of the strings through the partitioning wall from her side when she practiced. And she did drawings in physical media, on old-fashioned sheets of paper, using charcoal sticks and colored pencils that had to be sharpened and replaced frequently.

  She’d done charcoal portraits of the whole crew. They were part of a group of intricate drawings that decorated the bulkheads down in the engineering workshop. Light and shadow, shape and texture, all brought into existence just by the pressure and tilt of a piece of sharpened charcoal. Aden had always considered engineering and art two different branches of the skill tree far away from each other, but Tess seemed to excel at both in equal measure. He was neither artsy nor technically inclined, and watching her quiet and confident mastery at both work and play sometimes made him feel inadequate and uninteresting. Mostly, however, she made him want to get to know her better.

  “Twelve more hours of this, then the handover, then eighteen to get back to the busy neighborhood,” Tristan said. “That’s four or five meals out of the box. Chances are good you’ll draw a number eleven at some point.”

  Aden let go of Tristan’s bottle of Liquid Sunshine and gave it a nudge toward Tess. It tumbled through the air above the table, slowly flipping end over end.

  “If you do, this might help,” he said. She caught the bottle and squirted out a dab, which coalesced into a little red sphere in the zero-g environment. Tess snatched it up with her mouth.

  “That’s really good,” she proclaimed, and Tristan smiled with satisfaction.

  “Five box meal surprises in a row,” she said. “I know they’re paying double fee for hauling that cargo. But some hardships can’t be compensated fairly.”

  “What do you think we’re hauling?” Tristan asked.

  Tess shrugged. “Maya says it’s not explosives or ammunition. If they’re paying double to hire a stealth ship, it’s contraband, no question. The drop-off is somewhere in space, so we’re just a leg in the delivery, and not the final one.”

  “Something that’s going to end up on Rhodia. What’s their main prohibitionist fetish?”

  “Synthetic stims,” Aden replied. “But everyone has those banned. Black-market cybernetics. Military weapons. Anything with combat AI in it.”

  “You worried we’re smuggling some sort of assassin robot?” Tess said.

  “I just know I’m worried,” he admitted. “It won’t matter what kind of contraband it is if we get caught, right? So I’m not sure I want to know about it.”

  He recalled the exchange he had witnessed on the airlock deck ten hours earlier.

  “It was just something one of them said to the other. When they were leaving the ship. Just a quick exchange, three or four words. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. But it rubbed me the wrong way, you know? Gave me a bad feeling.”

  “You didn’t hear them? Or you didn’t understand what they were saying?” Tess asked.

  “I was three or four meters too far to hear them well enough. They were facing away from me and talking to each other.”

  “If it’s bothering you that much, you can just check the sensor records from the airlock,” she said. “If they were still in the airlock, the audio feed probably picked them up just fine.”

  He felt a little stupid. Of course the ship would have sensors monitoring the only access lock, the one through which everyone had to go if they wanted to enter or leave.

  “How do I do that?”

  “Come on.” Tess unbuckled her lap belt and pushed herself away from the table. “I’ll show you.”

  They floated down to the airlock deck. Tess drifted over to the control panel of the airlock and brought up a screen. The cargo container sat where they had secured it hours earlier, still just a silent piece of heavy-duty polymer.

  “All right, here’s the data from when they walked in. Come here and scrub this to the point where you think they said something to each other.”

  Aden floated next to her and st
arted to drift away again slowly. He looked for a handhold but didn’t see one in reach. Tess reached up and pulled him next to her.

  He took over the screen and advanced the visuals to the point where the Iron Pig crew had completed their delivery and started to make their way back. The one with the empty float went first. Then the other two stepped into the airlock. He froze it just before the left one turned his head, increased the audio volume, and tapped the CONTINUE field. It was a high-resolution image, and the audio was crystal clear, as if someone had spoken loudly into his ear.

  This time he heard the words sharply. At first, he again failed to understand them, but then it was like a rusty cog in his brain had loosened and was starting to turn in sync with the machinery once more. He rushed to repeat the segment. The words didn’t change. A twisting sensation had materialized in his stomach that had nothing to do with the zero-g environment.

  “We have to show this to the captain,” he said.

  “Let me get this perfectly straight,” Decker said ten minutes later. The crew was assembled in front of the viewscreen on the airlock deck, and Aden had replayed the sensor recording for them half a dozen times. Now that he knew what the spacer had said to his comrade, the words became clearer and more obvious with every viewing.

  “You’re saying the transport is a setup because of the slang you heard coming out of this man’s mouth,” Decker said and pointed at the frozen image of the Iron Pig spacer on the screen.

  “Not just a setup,” he said. “They think we won’t be there anymore once everything’s concluded.”

  “Because he said we had a nice ship.”

  “That’s not quite what he said. Well, it is, but not in that way. It’s how he used that phrase.”

  “Run it by the people who aren’t linguists,” Henry said. “What the fuck kind of language was he using? Didn’t sound like anything to me. The AI didn’t recognize it either.”

  “That’s the point,” Aden said. “It’s a cryptolect.”

  “A cryptolect,” Decker repeated.

  “Yeah. A cant. What you speak when you don’t want to be overheard. You know how the dockhands and the mechanics at the stations have their own slang? Sort of like that. Only it’s like a whole different language altogether.”

  “And you know that slang,” Henry said. “Without a doubt.”

  Aden nodded.

  “So what the fuck is it?”

  “It’s from Gretia. It’s a cant the bad boys use among themselves. The crime syndicates.”

  “But it’s not Gretian,” Decker said. Aden shook his head.

  “They carried it over from some Old Earth language. I mean, they still speak Gretian to each other. They just pepper it with this cant. Use different verbs and nouns. Make such a hash of it that even the AI can’t figure it out past the basics.”

  “And you would know this how exactly? Studied it in language school?”

  Aden shook his head. “I told you my mother was Gretian. I spent a lot of time there when I was a child. Three months every summer.”

  “And you worked your way into the local criminal underworld at age twelve,” Henry said. “That’s how you recognize their vocabulary.”

  Aden looked around, anxiety squeezing his chest and constricting his lungs. Everyone looked back at him with various degrees of incredulity. Only Maya had a neutral expression on her face as she listened to his continued attempts at an explanation.

  “Some of it worked its way into slang over the decades,” he said. “The kids in Sandvik use a bunch of loanwords from it. It’s what you speak when you want to sound tough. Because the real tough guys speak it.”

  He played back the sensor record again.

  “Three words. The first means ‘not good.’ The other two mean ‘nice ship.’ But the way he used the first one, it’s more like ‘too bad.’ You use that word in that context, you mean a regrettable event. He was saying, ‘What a shame, that’s a nice ship.’ And it was casual. Dismissive. Like it was unavoidable.”

  The airlock deck was silent for a moment. Decker studied the frozen faces of the Iron Pig spacers on the viewscreen with a frown.

  “I believe him,” Maya said. “I mean, I believe that he believes in what he’s saying. Look at him. He’s scared.”

  Tess coasted over to the cargo box and placed a hand on the lid.

  “What are we hauling here?” she said softly.

  “All right,” Decker said. “Let’s hear opinions. Aden says that there’s evidence these people aren’t going to honor their end of the contract. Likely in a bad way.”

  She nodded over at the cargo container.

  “If we break contract, we’ll piss off the customer. We’ll lose the fee and the money for all the fuel we’ve burned so far. And we’ll take a hit to our reputation. They’ll give us bad marks on the exchange.”

  “We don’t break contract and Aden’s right, we all end up dead maybe,” Tess said.

  There was another silence, this one longer than the first. Aden had never wanted more in his life to be wrong. If they blew off the contract because of him, it would harm their livelihoods, maybe even cost them the ship.

  “I don’t think we have enough evidence to make that call yet,” Maya said. “But I know that I would really like to see what’s in that container. Because I don’t want to get killed over it. And I think that the contents may help with our decision.”

  “Breaking customer confidentiality,” Henry cautioned. “That’s almost as bad as skipping out on a contract and just stealing the cargo.”

  “I vote to open it and have a look, take it from there,” Tristan said.

  “Same here,” Tess said.

  “I’d love to be proven wrong,” Aden said. “I want us to open that and find a thousand counterfeit comtabs or something.”

  “All right,” Decker said. “Tess, how do you feel about that security lock on the container? Think you can hack it?”

  “Officially? That’s a high-grade lock, best encryption money can buy. Takes years to hack, if you can do it at all.”

  “And unofficially?”

  “Unofficially, let me float down to engineering and get my data deck,” Tess said. “I’ll have that thing open in five minutes.”

  Tess hadn’t oversold her abilities. Four minutes and forty seconds after she had connected her data link, the latches of the container receded with an authoritative click that made everyone on the deck jump a little.

  “Let’s see what you are,” she said. She unplugged her data link from the lock and tucked away her deck before it could float off and get damaged. Then she popped the locking latches on the container lid and carefully opened it to peek inside.

  “Huh,” she said.

  She swung the lid open all the way so they could all see the contents. There was a second container nestled into the first one, set into an elaborate latticework of spacers and buffers. This container was flat black, and it had handling warnings in bright-yellow writing all around it.

  “That’s a Category Six hard-shielded cargo box,” Tess said. “No wonder the scanners didn’t pick up shit. That’s for critical freight. Valuable critical freight. Like a memory core with half a billion ags on it.”

  “Or two hundred kilos of palladium,” Henry said.

  “Still want to open it?” Tess asked. “This might make an entire planet fall on our heads, people.”

  “Do it,” Decker said.

  Tess opened the lock on the second container as well. This one took more time, and when she was finished, the locking bolts retracted into the casing with a barely audible little snap. She grasped the lid with both hands and lifted it up. It came away cleanly, displaying a layer of impact foam. In the middle of it, a meter-long matte gray cylinder with the diameter of a dinner plate was snugly embedded in a precise cutout. It had markings on it, but Aden couldn’t read them from his angle.

  “Motherfucker,” Tess said. Her tone was almost casual, but if they hadn’t been in zero g, Aden coul
d tell that she would have had to sit down hard. Next to him, Henry muttered what he assumed was the Palladian version of the same curse.

  “Is that palladium?” Aden asked.

  “That,” Tess said after a moment of silence, “is a Mark Sixteen tactical nuclear warhead.”

  CHAPTER 13

  DUNSTAN

  Dunstan huffed through the last three of his twenty pull-ups. Each one took more effort, and only the knowledge that the twentieth was the last one made him summon the willpower to get his chin over the bar. Minotaur was on the way home at one standard g of acceleration, but on the pull-ups, he could have sworn that a cheeky engineer increased the burn by 10 percent every time his commander started a set, just to vex the Old Man. It was a more comforting theory than having to face that, at forty-six years old, he couldn’t bang out twenty pull-ups with the same ease as he could when he was a cadet.

  He dropped from the bar and reached for his towel to wipe the sweat from his face. Next to him, the intercom panel chirped.

  “Bosworth here. Sorry to disturb you on your off watch, sir, but do you have a few minutes to come up to the AIC? It’s kind of urgent, I think.”

  Dunstan finished wiping his face before replying.

  “Of course, Lieutenant. But I have to tell you that your timing is lousy. A minute earlier, and I would have had an excuse to skip the pull-ups. I’ll be there in a moment.”

  “I’m eighty percent sure this is a prank or a trick of some sort,” Lieutenant Bosworth said when Dunstan stepped into the AIC, still in his sweaty exercise clothes.

  “It’s not a good time and place for pranks. What do you have?”

  “We just got pinged by an Oceanian courier boat. They say they’re on a delivery run. And they just discovered that their contract cargo is a nuke.”